I’ve been doing quite a bit of documentation lately, and one of the things I’ve been trying to do is get my lab up to speed (and documented) with the latest and greatest VMware has to offer, as well as how to reproduce my lab environment for our internal company use. When dealing with “labs”, for many this leads to the challenge of getting storage that is easy to set up and just works.

While we use fiber here in production, at a previous gig I’d used NFS and iSCSI in prod with great success. We never had any issues with the storage platform we used, and EVERYTHING was run on IP based storage. It made it an easy decision to use NFS here in the lab.

With three DL580s (two ESX, one storage) ready to go and one smaller server for a vCenter box, we’re ready to roll out the lab. But what to use for a storage platform?

A tweet from nexenta showed up asking for a blogger to write about NexentaStor , good or bad, and they would get some free software. (you guys didn’t specify that it needed to be an actual product review in the initial post btw)

I wouldn’t normally jump, but this is Nexenta, ZFS with Ubuntu userland. A quick read of the licensing policy caused me some confusion however.

Tongue in cheek, I replied saying they can’t be duplicitous in their message. Obviously, they can do whatever they want, but it seems a bit convoluted to understand what their real story is.

Nexenta uses closed source software and open source together, called the hybrid development model. They state “there is no vendor lock in because the data is stored on ZFS”. This comment confuses me a great deal. As I’m primarily concerned today about VMware storage, this seems odd. It’s my data that I care about, and with VMware as my target, I can’t think of any platform that prevents storage vmotion.

But here’s the rest of that thought. A HUGE component of what makes up nexenta is free software. Solaris (or OpenSolaris) is free, so is Ubuntu. And there are for profit companies behind both of them, yet their products remain open.

I guess that’s the elephant in the room, Vendor lock-in doesn’t occur at the storage layer, it occurs at the innovation and software layer.

Trying to push the marketing message of the company aside, let’s see if I can get their ZFS backed, Ubuntu enhanced proprietary capped storage solution up and running in my lab. I’ll be comparing it with what you can do with just basic free Solaris soon. I’d love to hear what other people’s thoughts are around Nexenta and NexentaStor.