In the near future I may have a requirement to provide storage for a couple of VMWare servers that are currently running NFS off an ageing Netapp appliance. As good as the Netapp probably is, the chance of it going wrong worries me as I don't really have a clue what I'm doing with it, and it won't run forever. Using FreeBSD would be nice as I know it like the back of my hand, and ZFS provides a lot of nice features and peace of mind. However, I'd rather stick with NFS if possible (Not a fan of massive vmfs zvols that I can't access at all unless VMware will mount them) but know that it used to be a terrible mix performance wise.
Does anyone have any idea what current performance is like? It used to be that you could get it passable by using a decent SSD for ZIL, but even then I don't remember being able to actually max out 1Gb Ethernet. However back then PCIe/NVMe storage didn't really exist unless you sold the house and brought a FusionIO.
Ideally I'd want to at least be able to break the 1Gb barrier on writes, and make half decent use of 10Gb Ethernet when reading. Really I need to use HDDs to get the space needed (at least 10TB) so I'd probably be looking at NVMe/PCIe ZIL/L2ARC, although have also entertained the idea of full SSD (although would probably still need something special to get ZIL performance up).
Does anyone have any idea what current performance is like? It used to be that you could get it passable by using a decent SSD for ZIL, but even then I don't remember being able to actually max out 1Gb Ethernet. However back then PCIe/NVMe storage didn't really exist unless you sold the house and brought a FusionIO.
Ideally I'd want to at least be able to break the 1Gb barrier on writes, and make half decent use of 10Gb Ethernet when reading. Really I need to use HDDs to get the space needed (at least 10TB) so I'd probably be looking at NVMe/PCIe ZIL/L2ARC, although have also entertained the idea of full SSD (although would probably still need something special to get ZIL performance up).