Best Option / Raid-1 of SSD or ZFS raidZ1

[devinacosta]

Currently I have all my Virtual Machines running on a Single Enterprise grade SSD disk on the server. I would like to add redundancy to limit possibly any issues with the SSD failing and losing all my VM's at once.

I am considering two options:
1st option: create a hardware RAID-1 of 2 x Enterprise SSD's and then migrate all VMs onto this new mount point.
2nd option: create ZFS filesystem of 2 disks in Raid-Z1

Looking for people's idea if i should consider ZFS when only having 2 disks (both Enterprise SSD) or should i just use hardware RAID?

 

[ph0x]

I would go for the zfs option as it gives you fs level snapshot support and you're not tied to the availability of a certain raid controller if anything goes wrong.

 

[czechsys]

Depends...

1] experience with zfs?
2] performance requirements?
3] HW available?
4] etc...

 

[devinacosta]

I am using all HP DL360 Generation 8 hardware, I am using Intel DC SSD drives that so far have been extremely reliable. (Knock on wood) I haven't had a single failure of any of my SSDS yet in almost 2 years. I clearly know that one day one of them will fail because of Murphys law. The SSD's are rated quite high in terms of IOPs like being able to do like 75,000 IOPs for both random reads/writes.

Each Hypervisor is hosting about 40-50 QEMU Full VM's at this point in time. I wouldn't say that the IO requirements have been that crazy, and so far the SSD's that are there now have easily been able to handle the load.

 

[rholighaus]

We have been using two HP DL360 Gen8 with Samsung pm833a/pm1643 in a striped mirror ZFS setup for many years. Very fast and reliable - but you need to use a proper HBA, preferably one that support SAS3.