Suggestions for a NAS for VMware storage [closed]

Solution 1:

FreeBSD 8.2, running ZFS. ZFS includes the following out of the box:

Supports NFS & iSCSI out of the box.
ZFS includes Snapshots, data checksums, multiple copies, filesystem compression
RAID-Z - Similar to RAID-5, but without the RAID-5 write hole. All disk writes are atomic copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is never inconsistent (No need to FSCK after a power outage!).
Double-parity RAID-Z2 (e.g. RAID-6, but without the write hole)
(soon) data deduplication
There is no need for an expensive RAID controller, so you can drop that layer of complexity.

Read more about the benefits of ZFS in this short summary at http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/whatis .

FreeBSD is a very solid operating system, and ZFS is surprisingly easy to learn and use.

This solution is free. There's no cost. There are a couple additional packaged products which are similar:

http://www.ixsystems.com/storage/ix/home-office-storage/freenas-mini.html (If you need support). Ixsystems is involved with FreeBSD/FreeNAS development, which is a plus.
http://www.freenas.org/ - A storage product based off of FreeBSD 8. FreeBSD is general purpose, but FreeNAS is geared towards being a storage appliance.
http://www.nexenta.org/ - This is the Illumos/OpenIndiana/OpenSolaris core with a Linux userland system. I've heard many good things about this, but the hybrid OS is a little strange to me. Nexenta is involved with core Illumos/OpenIndiana development, which is a plus.

My current recommendation is NexentaStor, available in a free community-supported edition and as a commercial offering.

Also see:

Anybody have experience with using Nexenta?

NexentaStor CE or Openfiler? Which do you recommend?