VMWare Shared Storage/Datastore

[BSTAMPER]

I'm looking at building a FreeNAS for home here to use as either iSCSI or NFS target from ESX hosts. Researching I'm seeing LOTS of details about HBA's and what I should look at but everything is referencing Large 4+ TB drives. Given vmware likes IO I was looking at doing a 16x 256GB SSD deployment but I'm not finding anyone anywhere using SSD's for the actual storage. Just SLOG etc. Are people building any full SSD deployments? IS there a reason not to?

 

[IceBoosteR]

Hi there,

in the forum I did not see anyone doing a full SSD built. Mostly its too expensive and the actual "normal" home user has some documents, videos and stuff, and this is enough. Even in some enterprise environments SSD are not implemented (yet). So SSDs do push a lot of IOPS and the HBAs which is common in the forum on IT mode (IBM ServeRAID m1015) has also his limitations.
https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-2-performance-lsi-92208i/
For enough power I would suggest you will go with a new HBA which is capable of SAS-3...
But this is only an idea.

 

[BSTAMPER]

Understood but I guess my question still stands. Is there any reason not to use SSD's for the storage? 240/250 GB SSDs are around ~$90. I would think this would WAY out perform anything else and work very well as a datastore. My issue is I don't see anyone talking about doing SSD for the drives so I'm curious if its just an "expense" thing as most are looking for large storage rather than I/O or if there is really some technical reason not to.

 

[IceBoosteR]

Understood but I guess my question still stands. Is there any reason not to use SSD's for the storage? 240/250 GB SSDs are around ~$90. I would think this would WAY out perform anything else and work very well as a datastore. My issue is I don't see anyone talking about doing SSD for the drives so I'm curious if its just an "expense" thing as most are looking for large storage rather than I/O or if there is really some technical reason not to.

I think there is no technical reason why not, more a monetary thing.

 

[Inxsible]

The only technical thing would be that SSDs have limited number of writes, although it would take a long time to reach that number. Not exactly sure how many writes, but then again HDDs last about 5-6 years on average too. So if your SSDs can last at least that long, then it is only a matter of cost and amount of space.

 

[Stux]

There is no technical reason not to use SSDs. Your bottlenecks will move around. There's not as much information (but there is some), purely because its just not as common.

 

[Rick Arman]

I've wondered that myself about the SSD build. Next year, I would like to go ALL SSD and be done with it.