iSCSI Vs NFS testing on Prodction VM's

[Cooldude09]

Hi All,

I need few suggestions from all the experts here..

I am evaluating the difference between iSCSI & NFS storage on the production VM's. The intention is to figure out that the VM's running on the iSCSI storage can be run on NFS storage very well, so that we can order for NFS storage for our new datacenter.

What I did is I selected few VM's on the iSCSI storage and will be monitoring using the Veeam monitoring tool. I will be focussing on the Network utilization and Disk usage to benchmark the values used by the VM's

After a week's time, I will be migrating the same to the NFS storage and benchmark the values. But on Veeam, I dont see any disk utilization for the VM's on NFS.

Is the approach I am using correct? Is there any more monitoring tools you can suggest

Anil Gupta

Don’t fear changes, its constant in life, reduce your ecological footprint……………………..Go Green

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[kjb007]

Since your storage will be completely network based either way, and all your I/O is going through them, I'd test the throughput to each device from a second server or vm. Mount an iSCSI drive on a server, and then mount an NFS drive. Using IOmeter, test the throughput to both disks and see how will they stack up. Remember also that iSCSI is block level, while NFS is file level storage.

-KjB

VMware vExpert

[CraigAlexander]

When you create a datastore on an NFS share there is no corresponding disk to monitor under ESX.

With iSCSI, the disk appears to ESX to be a local drive.

To compare performance you should use a tools that monitors the performance of the OS running on the VM.

Regards

Craig

[AndreTheGiant]

See also: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1256837

[Cooldude09]

Thanks Kanuj,

Any more thoughts guys?

Anil Gupta

Don’t fear changes, its constant in life, reduce your ecological footprint……………………..Go Green

if you found my answer to be useful, feel free to mark it as Helpful or Correct.

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[Josh26]

I can't specifically say whether this is expected with Veeam, but it would make sense.

iSCSI is seen as a disk. NFS is more like mapping a drive in Windows to an SMB share. Your Windows Performance Monitor won't be able to tell you anything about contention on such a disk, and I'd expect Veeam or any other monitoring tool to behave the same.

A better test would be an OS based test, such as to dd a large file and time it.

[anujmodi1]

Hi Anil,

If you are using hardware iSCSI storage for production VMs, then you will have advantage over s/w iSCSI and NFS. But I am not sure which iSCSI storage you are using.

you can also monitor the performance of VMs with ESXTOP in batch mode or replay mode.... which will give you the complete network and disk performance. I haven't worked with Veeme Monitoring tool. NFS also a good option while considering the production VMs and as they are reliable storage and provide advantages like thin provisioning etc.

you can see lot of comarison available on the net b/w nfs and iscis. they will tell you depending on what kind of production vm will be hosted on those storage.

http://www.technomagesinc.com/papers/ip_paper.html

http://rajeev.name/blog/2005/10/12/nfs-vs-iscsi/

I hope this will give you more understanding while taking decision b/s nfs and iscsi.

Regards,

Anuj