What would you do

[EQNish]

When I built my FN a few years ago, I really didn't understand zfs (not that I totally do now) and I added all 16 disks to a single raidz2 vdev, with a single vol on the vdev. now several years, and drive upgrades I still have one large vdev, I'm about to upgrade drives again, and thought I would take this opportunity to recreate my storage platform.
I mainly use the NAS as a storage for my lab work host VMs over iscsi on a 10G network all of this files are 40+ gig (VHDX or VHMK). I also use the NAS as a total file repository\backup of OneDrive and currently sync about 2TB of various sized files (MP3s, Word, Exel, JPG..etc), and SMB shares of ISOs and more random files over LACP (1 4Port NIC), and I host one windows VM, a secondary DC for my Lab forest.

Chassis =(2) E5 v2 Xeons, 128GB of ram, Drives are all 10K SAS2 spinners

I'm moving to 4TB drives, I have 20 which leaves 4 blanks in my chassis, I'm considering;
(4) 5 drive vdevs or (5) 4 drive vdevs, either in raidz I lose some redundancy, but gain a lot of flexibility
In these scenarios I would create 2 vols, most likely splitting them based on what they are doing (vms over the 10G vs files over the 4x1G)
or
(2) 10 Drive vdevs, one large vol

I'm thinking the 4 blanks can be used to migrate storage to new vdevs, or maybe add some SSDs for "fast storage"
anyways...I'm just looking for some thoughts

 

[Basil Hendroff]

You might want to consider adding some L2ARC read cache

 

[EQNish]

You might want to consider adding some L2ARC read cache

I did consider it, but I didn't think I would get a big benefit out of it, I'll have to go back over the DOCs for L2ARC

 

[Basil Hendroff]

Here's an interesting article on ZIL and SLOG as well.

 

[jgreco]

RAIDZ is inappropriate for VMDK storage.

See the sticky at the top of this forum, https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/the-path-to-success-for-block-storage.81165/

 

[EQNish]

RAIDZ is inappropriate for VMDK storage.

See the sticky at the top of this forum, https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/the-path-to-success-for-block-storage.81165/

I assume you are point that out to me, for me to consider Mirrors for my VM presentation over iSCSI? while I understand the concern (I think) about frag, speed is not really of concern to me, the VMs are only for lab purposes and the only time slow disk access is a concern is if I am suspending/waking the VMs. I mean I guess it's worth consideration, but as I understand it, I would lose redundancy or space moving a presentation to mirror...or did I miss the mark