Best method to present two SSDs in a RAID0 to ESXi

[Fuzzball]

Sorry about the noobish questions, but I was hoping someone with more knowledge can chime in. I've got a couple of Crucial M500 240GB SSDs that I'm planning on connecting to a M1015 card and am looking for the best way method of doing a RAID 0 (I don't care about redundancy) to be presented to a couple of ESXi 5.5 hosts via NFS or iSCSI. I'm looking for the best performance possible. One of my concerns is the lack of TRIM support in the various LSI firmwares I've found when doing a hardware RAID 0; this is for my home lab so I'm going to be building and tearing down a bunch of VMs on occasion.
These are the configs I was considering:

• Hardware RAID 0 on the LSI card and configure the iSCSI target to be that hardware device. I'm not 100% sure this would work. I'm guessing it would have the best performance in theory.
• Hardware RAID 0 on the LSI card, format the volume as UFS or ZFS, and configure the iSCSI target to be a file on that volume or do NFS
• Flash the LSI card for IT mode, use the two drives in a ZFS Stripped Vdev, and configure the iSCSI target to be a file on that volume or do NFS

I am open to other suggestions as well. I've already got the box doing other storage for my home devices in addition to iSCSI and NFS for the ESXi boxes, but I haven't been fully satisfied with the performance of the VMs with my existing storage. I'm leaning towards iSCSI as NFS has shown atrocious write performance which I'm guessing is due to ESXi requiring sync writes. Everything else I use the server for has been great.

 

[jgreco]

iSCSI will be just as atrocious once you set sync=always, because of course that's what you're supposed to do.

If you do not care, you can use NFS and set sync=disabled, which is approximately the same thing as iSCSI without sync=always, but more convenient for accessing and manipulating your VM files. This is never recommended for production use.

There is no value to using the "hardware RAID" on an M1015 with ZFS.