ZCS on vmware esxi

[jerryboi]

Having used the community version for quite a while I am migrating to the Network Edition. I am planning to install on vmware esxi4.1, and I am limited to 32bit version. (which I understand will be phased out soon after the 7.0 release.)
I need help choosing the distro. I have been using CentOS5 and I was mostly happy with it. But this seems to be a good opportunity to switch to Ubuntu or SUSE which are less of a fork of the kernel at 2.6.18. Not that there is a lot of stuff I am planning to install on the ZCS vm, but I was told ext4 fs significantly reduces fragmentation and increases vm performance. Can anyone cnfirm this, please?

[bdial]

why are you limited to 32bit? esxi4.1 only runs on 64bit machines now and even earlier 32bit hypervisors can still run 64bit vms if you have a good processor.

if you're familiar with centos it might be best to stick with that. while not officially supported, it has worked fine for quite some time now. but if you want to switch i'd recommend suse.

not sure about hte fs issue, i think ext4 should be fine

[jerryboi]

My processor has not got the vti flag so I am limited to 32bit vms. There is no ext4 on CentOS, as it is stuck with kernel v 2.6.18. Hence the dilemma.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by jerryboi

My processor has not got the vti flag so I am limited to 32bit vms. There is no ext4 on CentOS, as it is stuck with kernel v 2.6.18. Hence the dilemma.

You could mount the /opt/zimbra directory structure on a separate partition and use the xfs file system (my preferred fs ), it well tried, tested, scalable and fast.

[jerryboi]

My concern is minimizing hdd seek, as that seems to quite obviously slow down my system. It is its resistance to fragmentation what makes ext4 desirable, and fragmentation is one of the aspects in which xfs performs rather well -- so I might as well just take your advice. Are there any parameters you would recommend when mkfs.xfsing?

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by jerryboi

My concern is minimizing hdd seek, as that seems to quite obviously slow down my system. It is its resistance to fragmentation what makes ext4 desirable, and fragmentation is one of the aspects in which xfs performs rather well -- so I might as well just take your advice. Are there any parameters you would recommend when mkfs.xfsing?

The defaults seem to work pretty well for me, I have a 3.5TB RAID array that's had something like 4% fragmentation after about 5 years in production (so far). You can always defragment the filesystem, if you feel it necessary, but none of my machines have ever suffered more than a couple of percent of fragmentation - that's several active servers and a couple of workstations. I think the only thing I changed from the defaults was to have the following mount options: noatime,logbufs=8,logbsize=256k - they're self explanatory, I guess.