I am looking for a solution for my datastore.
Right now I have one physical machine with local disks: 2 HDD SAS(RAID1) and 3 HDD SATA(RAID5), on RAID1 lies ESXi4.1 with equivalent datastore1 (RAID1) and datastore2 (RAID5).
I am going to have only small number of VM's (e.g. 2-4 VM's which should not have excessive HDD consumption) so I decided to put them on datastore1, datastore2 so far is empty only with VMFS file system.
One of my VM is Linux Debian with DRBL application that will distribute clonezilla images through LAN.
What I need is to know what options do I have to share/connect/attach "datastore2"/RAID5 array to my Linux Debian VM images.
I was wondering about creating VM with "FreeNAS" on datastore2 with maximum capacity of RAID5 (1,5TB) and maximum block size, share that to Linux (as NFS/SAMBA/FTP etc) but if I will attach another disk to RAID5 for extra capacity, I think probably there will be problem with maximum file size (2TB) in VMFS file system, not mentioning that FreeNAS isnt a speed deamon (aprox 40-60MB/s).
I was read about iSCSI but I'm not very familliar with that, but what I'm looking for it is some kind of attaching iSCSI (or some other technology) with 'VMware datastore2' to Linux machine and maybe other machine or just use RAID5 storage inside Linux Guest. Is it possible to do that in some way?
What do you suggest to solve my needs?