VMware and NFS - A Better Way?

[hermanpeckel]

I've been using FreeNAS at home for some time now and I'm a big fan. Embarrassingly though, it has been a bit of a "set and forget" job and it's only now that I'm wanting to tune things.

I have a diskless VM host that connects to my FreeNAS via iSCSI. The FreeNAS is an N54L with 4 x 3TB drives that I set up in RAIDZ giving 7.7TB usable. On that I made one huge pool and set up all my VMware servers in that pool. My fileserver is the main disk hog as all my media files are on that server.

Now, let's just say, performance isn't great. I realise it is down to my rubbish configuration, so what I was going to do was bite the bullet, back it all up, and start again.

I need about 1.5TB of disk space for my servers, and some sort of file storage. I was thinking 1.5TB VM storage and the rest direct access via NFS.

As you can tell, I'm no expert, so any advice would be great!

Thanks!!
HP

 

[anodos]

I've been using FreeNAS at home for some time now and I'm a big fan. Embarrassingly though, it has been a bit of a "set and forget" job and it's only now that I'm wanting to tune things.

I have a diskless VM host that connects to my FreeNAS via iSCSI. The FreeNAS is an N54L with 4 x 3TB drives that I set up in RAIDZ giving 7.7TB usable. On that I made one huge pool and set up all my VMware servers in that pool. My fileserver is the main disk hog as all my media files are on that server.

Now, let's just say, performance isn't great. I realise it is down to my rubbish configuration, so what I was going to do was bite the bullet, back it all up, and start again.

I need about 1.5TB of disk space for my servers, and some sort of file storage. I was thinking 1.5TB VM storage and the rest direct access via NFS.

As you can tell, I'm no expert, so any advice would be great!

Thanks!!
HP

1.5 TB isn't a terribly large amount of storage. You can get some large-ish ssds fairly cheap these days. Put a mirrored pair of ssds on your 'disksless' VM server to take load off the freenas. Switch the freenas server to having mirrors, add some sort of slog, and use NFS to provide storage for remaining VMS and whatever else you want to do.

 

[jgreco]

I have to agree. The problem is that you have to throw a LOT of resources at iSCSI on FreeNAS. Of that usable space, if you're filling it past ~30-50%, fragmentation will eventually kill you. And I'm pretty sure you want to use more of your space than that.

I strongly suggest that you consider what @anodos says. The SanDisk Ultra II 960GB SSD has recently been on sale for $199, and if you want to go up a notch in quality, the Intel 535 480GB is between $150-$180 these days. Because of the way SSD prices have been dropping, I've been putting 535's on production hypervisors in RAID1, because the cost of doing that and adding a hot spare (5 drives total) is around $750, which is so much cheaper than the $1320 it'd be for just four of the DC S3500 480's I had actually specced originally. Who cares if they fail in a year. Prices will drop and I can still afford to replace the failed units and still probably come out ahead.

The shared iSCSI storage thing is great when you've got multiple hypervisors, want to archive old VM's, or have need for large slowish storage, but for a relatively small datastore, go get yourself a nice HBA in IR mode, toss some decent SSD's on it, and watch it fly.

 

[hermanpeckel]

Thanks guys! Really good info, and although it wasn't what I had in mind, from what you say, the end result will be much better. I actually have a couple of old 1TB Intel SSD's that I could use as the VM store. They may not be the best or fastest, but I guess as proof of concept to start with they will be fine.

Time to backup and start again!

Thanks again for your help!

 

[jgreco]

Well, the ultimate goal is to figure out the best path, not necessarily the all-FreeNAS path. ;-)