Nas4Free as ESX storage - file or volume extents ?

[atakacs]

Folks

Pretty new to Nas4Free / iSCSI - please bear with me.

I am currently setting up my first server that I intend to use to use for iSCSI storage for an ESXi server.

I am using ZFS.

Is there any recommendation / best practice about using file vs ZFS volume based extents in this context ?

Thanks for your comments

[Lee Sharp]

iSCSI is easy... However, you can not dynamically move VMs across ESXi servers that way... If you do NFS mounts, it is NOT easy. There is a sync race condition that can cause issues. Using ZFSKernalTune can help, but only a little. Having a big SSD drive for an external ZIL can also help. But the big break came when I saw this.

https://blogs.oracle.com/roch/entry/when_to_and_not_to

I am rebuilding my 12 drive array right not a 6 mirrored vdevs...

So, if you have one server, and want easy;
http://wiki.nas4free.org/doku.php?id=do ... zfs_volume

If you have 4k drives, you also need;
viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1494

If you want VMware over NFS, I may have a howto next week.

[marcos]

hello

I'm in similar circunstances:
-I've got an ESXi 5.1 home install for my schools excersises (I'm studying to become a sysad)
-I've just installed NAS4free 9.1.0.1 - (revisión 804) in an old core2duo with 6gb of RAM and two 1500gb hard disks
-I'd like to use it for filesharing, sporadical backups and as a ESXi datastore. (I don't need most of ZFS features, but I'd like to test it)
-I've formated both disks in ZFS and I've created a ZFS vdev with them
-Then I've created a pool with the vdev

Like I've said before, I would need a zfs datastore for video sharing, another one for music sharing etc... and a volume for iSCSI to use it with vmware (I thimk this can be done throuh NFS too). Then, if I'm not wrong, I just need to follow this guide to use the volume as an iSCSI target.

I'm a newbie in this sort of things (storage administartion etc...) so if somebody can point me in the right direction of how to do this (use NAS4free for simple home filesharing and at the same time as a iSCSI target for ESXi5.1) i would be really grateful.

Thanks for your help and your time

EDIT: i've managed to sort it out, it was as simple as creating a volume and following the scsi initiator proper steps. The only problem that I've found is related to the documentation: the old frenas docs call volumes to pools, zvol to real volumes etc...and that is very confusing for newbies like me:

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volume ... S_Datasets