[OmniOS-discuss] Shopping for an all-in-one server

[Johan Kragsterman]

-----"OmniOS-discuss" <omnios-discuss-bounces at lists.omniti.com> skrev: -----
Till: OmniOS-discuss <omnios-discuss at lists.omniti.com>
Från: Chris Ferebee 
Sänt av: "OmniOS-discuss" 
Datum: 2014-06-02 14:01
Ärende: Re: [OmniOS-discuss] Shopping for an all-in-one server

"Jim,

If you haven’t already, you certainly want to study Joyent’s parts lists closely:

<https://github.com/joyent/manufacturing>

Generally speaking, Supermicro is preferred, LSI HBAs in IT mode are almost mandatory, and a STEC ZeusRAM slog device might best for your use case if you don’t mind the cost premium over the Intel DC S3700. For raidz you need at least raidz2, if not higher, so the cost advantage over a pool of mirrors may not be worth it. As I understand it, writes to each raidz vdev are limited to the IOPS of a single disk. I’m still learning the ropes myself, so take all this with a grain of salt.

But about ESXi: I have an experimental machine running ESXi with two guests, SmartOS (with a lot of storage for various backups) and one OS X (which I use as my primary workstation). Things I’ve learned:

- There does not appear to be a supported VMXNET3 driver for Illumos, so virtualized networking for ESXi guests has to use the ESXi virtual e1000 device. I have had problems with that, with network throughput becoming irregular and finally stalling completely to where I had to reboot the SmartOS guest. The OS X guest works fine with the virtual e1000 device using the Apple driver.

- Because of this, I installed an additional Intel ethernet card and gave it to SmartOS via PCI passthru. Performance is now as expected. PCI passthru also works well with the LSI HBAs for SmartOS, and with an AMD GPU for OS X.

- The e1000 virtual device is limited to 1 Gbit/s, unlike VMXNET3. I would like to have SmartOS provide iSCSI volumes to ESXi to use as backing storage for VM (again, this is an experimental setup…), and the best idea I have come up with is to install two X520 10GbE NICs, give one to ESXi and pass one through to SmartOS. We’ll see how that goes.

Note that once you activate PCI passthru, you lose many of the advanced features of ESXi, such as migration.

Long story short, ESXi is impressive technology, and an excellent solution for virtualizing Windows (and OS X), as well as Linux. Support for Solaris, let alone Illumos, is sketchy.

For production use, I would definitely stick with SmartOS and KVM if you want to put everything on one box, that’s the sort of thing it’s designed for.

Best,
Chris"






Well, I wouldn't use smartos in production, for the simple fact that they got a strategy to not support fibre channel, which definitly is a show stopper for me, and all the people and organisations that uses fibre channel .



Rgrds Johan





> 
> So... any hints and suggestions are most welcome! ;)
> Thanks in advance,
> //Jim Klimov 
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