vSphere with HAST and ZFS and iSCSI

[tuaris]

I recently had an issue where I had to reboot my NAS4Free server due to a hardware problem, it was unavoidable. This unfortunately has a very negative affect on my vSphere cluster, so I am looking into setting up some type of high availability storage. Based on what I read so far it does not look like VMWare has solution (their data store replication seems to only be for disaster recovery purposes).

A few years ago I had experimented with HAST+CARP+ZFS on FreeBSD 9.0:
https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?&t=29996
http://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=29639

Sadly it was not suitable for production use due a problem with devd. I am re-considering using HAST with NAS4Free since it's possible many of the issues outlined above have been worked out in the last couple of years.

Before I go out and invest in hardware, I'd like to hear some thoughts on the idea of using HAST+CARP+ZFS+iSCSI with NAS4Free? Is it capable of supporting the high i/o that would be generated with all the running VM's?

[swissiws]

I am still using commercial SAN hardware for VMWare systems using dual controllers on SAN for cluster for load balancing/fault tolerance.

the core issue with HAST I currently experience having issues with LAGG + CARP interfaces.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... oses-state

Another issue - each power disruption of networking components between the two HAST hosts locations will eventually end up as split brain configuration, having manually to decide which system is primary. I am not sure how to resolve this issue.

maybe somebody else has experience in resolving those.