I am working on setting up a file system to handle millions of small files that will be randomly accessed. They will be served up via web servers using either NFS or SMB to access them. I like what I have been reading about XFS and some of its features such as parallelism. I want to have this be very high performance and that made me think about some things: are there any penalties or benefits of using either RAW mapping or putting the XFS partition on a VMDK stored on a VMFS partition? The back end storage is a Compellent SAN with tiered storage. Basically, does anyone know if it will make any differences in the way XFS performs if its built directly on the disk, or built onto of a VMFS partition?
I would be happy to accept any suggestions as well, I am in the designing phase now, so any thoughts or input would be helpful.
Regards,
Eduard Teiseler