Best filesystem choices for NFS storing VMware disk images

Posted by mlambie on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by mlambie
Published on 2010-05-24T01:51:15Z Indexed on 2010/05/24 2:02 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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vmware

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nfs

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opensolaris

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zfs

Currently we use an iSCSI SAN as storage for several VMware ESXi servers. I am investigating the use of an NFS target on a Linux server for additional virtual machines. I am also open to the idea of using an alternative operating system (like OpenSolaris) if it will provide significant advantages.

What Linux-based filesystem favours very large contiguous files (like VMware's disk images)? Alternatively, how have people found ZFS on OpenSolaris for this kind of workload?

(This question was originally asked on SuperUser; feel free to migrate answers here if you know how).

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