ISCSI or NFS for XEN shared storage

[tbaror]

Hello All,

I am building a storage for Xenserver platform that consist 7hosts ,I am starting planing which protocol should i use either NFS or ISCSI .
Since i am using FreeNas /ZFS from which i benefit more when i have 64GB memory in term of performance and off course redundancy and ease management.
Thanks

 

[leenux_tux]

tharor,

Purely from personal experience I would not use NFS as storage for Virtual Machines. I used to have VMWare ESXi running VM's on my FreeNAS box over NFS and iSCSI, iSCSI is much more responsive. I have now ditched VMWare in favour of Proxmox and the same holds true. iSCSI is much faster than NFS, for me anyway. NFS is great for storing ISO images, cloned images of your VM's etc but it just doesn't work well with VM's. One disadvantage of using iSCSI though is that (as far as I know) you can't copy files from the block device over to (for example) a backup device somewhere. It's possible to use snapshots, however, this just creates another block device (or updates the block device if it already exists) somewhere else.

 

[tbaror]

tharor,

Purely from personal experience I would not use NFS as storage for Virtual Machines. I used to have VMWare ESXi running VM's on my FreeNAS box over NFS and iSCSI, iSCSI is much more responsive. I have now ditched VMWare in favour of Proxmox and the same holds true. iSCSI is much faster than NFS, for me anyway. NFS is great for storing ISO images, cloned images of your VM's etc but it just doesn't work well with VM's. One disadvantage of using iSCSI though is that (as far as I know) you can't copy files from the block device over to (for example) a backup device somewhere. It's possible to use snapshots, however, this just creates another block device (or updates the block device if it already exists) somewhere else.

Thanks for the answer