[BBLISA] Faster than 1G Ether ... ESX to ZFS

[Edward Ned Harvey]

For anyone who cares:

I created an ESXi machine.  Installed two guest (centos) machines and
vmware-tools.  Connected them to each other via only a virtual switch.  Used
rsh to transfer large quantities of data between the two guests,
unencrypted, uncompressed.  Have found that ESXi virtual switch performance
peaks around 2.5Gbit.

Also, if you have a NFS datastore, which is not available at the time of ESX
bootup, then the NFS datastore doesn't come online, and there seems to be no
way of telling ESXi to make it come online later.  So you can't auto-boot
any guest, which is itself stored inside another guest.

So basically, if you want a layer of ZFS in between your ESX server and your
physical storage, then you have to have at least two separate servers.  And
if you want anything resembling actual disk speed, you need infiniband,
fibre channel, or 10G ethernet.  (Or some really slow disks.)   ;-)