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

[Chris Ferebee]

Dan,

I wouldn’t think you would want to migrate an Illumos storage appliance using ESXi/vSphere, no.

AFAIK, the things you can’t do in an ESXi VM with PCI passthrough (a. k. a. VMDirectPath) enabled are the following:

- migration (a. k. a. vMotion)
- memory overcommit
- snapshots
- suspend and resume
- record and replay
- fault tolerance
- virtual device hot add/remove

None of these seem especially relevant to an Illumos storage server.

OTOH, the only reason to use ESXi in the first place would be if you want to virtualize something that doesn’t fit well onto Illumos KVM. It seems preferable to run separate machines in that case, one Illumos storage server and one ESXi application server. I don’t know what Jim has in mind for ESXi - just passing along my experience.

A possible advantage of ESXi could be memory overcommit, depending on the use case.

Best,
Chris


Am 02.06.2014 um 16:16 schrieb Dan Swartzendruber <dswartz at druber.com>:

>> 
>> Note that once you activate PCI passthru, you lose many of the advanced
>> features of ESXi, such as migration.
> 
> Chris, thanks for all the info. I'm not sure I understand the relevance of
> your quoted comment.  Since this is an all-in-one server, I would think by
> definition you are never going to be migrating the storage appliance to a
> different host.  Or am I missing something?
>