SSD's for ZIL as VMWARE virtual Drives?

[mattlach]

Hey all,

The box I will be running FreeNAS on is a VMWare ESXi server.

FreeNAS will be a guest with the storage controller forwarded to it for direct native access to the drives.

I have read about putting the ZIL on SSD's to speed up the array, and was curious about experimenting with it.

Question is, can I do with with virtual drives?

The ESXi server that will be hosting FreeNAS already has two SSD's in it. One it just boots off of, and one it uses as a datastore for other guests.

If I were to create a small 10 GB virtual drive file on each SSD and present them to my FreeNAS guest, could I mirror them (for security from loss) and use them for my ZIL in FreeNAS, or does ZFS require native access to the drives for this?

Much obliged,
Matt

 

[pbucher]

Matt,

I once had used a small virtual drive on my ESXi 5.0u1 boot SSD for a period of time to enhance performance without problem. I moved onto other methods to increase performance since this didn't seem to be the best of ideas for a production setup. But it will work as a ZIL device and does increase performance similar to a real SSD drive.

-Paul

 

[mattlach]

Paul,

Thank you very much for the feedback on your experiences!

At this point, in order to get up and running without much expense I am probably going to try this, and then add individual SSD's at a later date!

--Matt