First of, i'm a webdeveloper and my server experience lies in setting up FreeBSD servers for webserver.
I'm working on a project for at photographer, and i'm hired to develop a new online photo ordering system – where user of course can view their photos 🙂 They have a massive need of storage, thus we have bought a HP G6 and 8x1TB SATA HDD.
Our plan is to install VMWare ESX 4.0, running multiple virtual machines; FreeBSD 8 for webserver and some windows servers. Allready done that.
Then mount one big storage to the BSD, and share it through Samba to the WinServers.
The raid is set up with an array of 2x 1TB to handle the VMs. And the rest is setup as 3 2x1TB to handle the photo-data. Thus 2.73TB for photo-data (the raids are 1+0).
Now if we add a datastore in the ESX and add the 3 LUNs we can get a datastore of 2.74TB.
But i don't se how i can add this datastore direct to the VM. Only the BSD VM needs access to this.
Only way is to create a VirtualDisk, with a max of 2TB (8MB blocksize). This is because the datastore where we save the virtualdisk has a maximum filesize of 2TB.
Then add it as a harddisk to the BSD VM.
In the 'Add Harddisk' pane for the VM, i see an option for Raw Disk Management. I think this is to access the datastore or the raid directly.
Only problem is that its greyed out!
Can i access the datastorage directly from the BSD? Without creating and adding virtualdisk.
Best Answer
This is a pretty good summary of your direct storage access options:
http://professionalvmware.com/2009/08/vmdirectpath-paravirtual-scsi-vsphere-vm-options-and-you/
Another options would be guest OS logical volumes or raiding to join multiple vmdk files together into one large volume.