FreeNAS – ESX and NFS; Synchronous Writes and the ZIL

I’ve been testing FreeNAS lately – connecting ESX hosts via NFS for virtual machine storage. Being POSIX compliant, ZFS must abide by any calls made with the o_sync flag set meaning essentially that all disk activity must be written to stable storage before success is returned. This includes most commonly databases, file server operations and most importantly NFS. This means that the ZIL (ZFS intent log) will be used as a special place on disk in the pool … Read more…

Habey ESC-2122C Storage Server Chassis Review

I have been testing lots of storage software lately – since a NetApp Filer is overkill for a home lab environment, I’m sticking with other software based storage. The goal has always been to serve storage for two things – Fast storage for an ESX cluster and lots of storage to share over the network with CIFS. The first iteration was a DL380G5 with a p800 card connected via external SAS to an MSA50. The … Read more…