Joyent Open Sources SmartOS: Zones, ZFS, DTrace and KVM

Re:Joyent Open Sources SmartOS: Zones, ZFS, DTrace and KVM by jkahn on Monday August 15, 2011 @11:03PM (#2889653)

I'm struggling to understand why ZFS makes enterprise storage obsolete. One of the benefits of the SAN is that it is shared amongst a number of servers.

How does ZFS help with that? Assuming you install SmartOS as virtualisation host, you'd still need some kind of shared storage.

[Edit:] The reason I point this out is that if you lose a host, you lose all VMs running on that host. And then you won't easily be able to get them back online on another host if you've lost your storage as well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Joyent Open Sources SmartOS: Zones, ZFS, DTrace and KVM by wmf on Monday August 15, 2011 @11:26PM (#2889715)

You can use ZFS+Comstar to create a SAN controller.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Joyent Open Sources SmartOS: Zones, ZFS, DTrace and KVM by organico on Thursday August 18, 2011 @03:50AM (#2898361)

But you were able to do this before SmartOS... I'm curious about this too, and how Joyent have architected their cloud arrangement. I feel like perhaps hypervisors have local ZFS storage, as opposed to large SAN-backed virtual machines, but I can't really find much useful information on how Joyent/SmartOS implement/architect storage...

[ Parent | on HN ]