From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from relay.sgi.com (relay3.corp.sgi.com [198.149.34.15]) by oss.sgi.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2163D7CBF for ; Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:50:31 -0500 (CDT) Received: from cuda.sgi.com (cuda2.sgi.com [192.48.176.25]) by relay3.corp.sgi.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id AE9F8AC003 for ; Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:50:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from greer.hardwarefreak.com (mo-65-41-216-221.sta.embarqhsd.net [65.41.216.221]) by cuda.sgi.com with ESMTP id krLBKSVOpkQl86mo for ; Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:50:29 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <51549F09.1090109@hardwarefreak.com> Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:50:33 -0500 From: Stan Hoeppner MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: Help with XFS in VMs on VMFS References: In-Reply-To: Reply-To: stan@hardwarefreak.com List-Id: XFS Filesystem from SGI List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Errors-To: xfs-bounces@oss.sgi.com Sender: xfs-bounces@oss.sgi.com To: Jan Perci Cc: xfs@oss.sgi.com On 3/28/2013 8:21 AM, Jan Perci wrote: > Normally I would use raw mappings and XFS directly on the volumes. But > there is a hard requirement to support VM snapshots, so all the data must > reside within VMDK files on the VMFS datastores. Since when? ESX has had LUN snapshot capability back to 3.0, 6 years or so. It may have required the VCB add on back then. Is this simply a limitation of the freebie version? If so, pony up and pay for what you need, or switch to a FOSS solution which has no such limitations. VMFS volumes are not intended for high performance IO. Unless things have changed recently, VMware has always recommended housing only OS images and the like in VMDKs, not user data. They've always recommended using RDMs for everything else. IIRC VMDKs have a huge block (sector) size, something like 1MB. That's going to make XFS alignment difficult, if not impossible. I cannot stress emphatically enough that you should not stitch 2TB VMDKs together and use them in the manner you described. This is a recipe for disaster. Find another solution. -- Stan _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@oss.sgi.com http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs