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jesszen
Contributor
Contributor
‎11-30-2009 01:25 PM

How many VMs are you running on OpenFiler iSCSI datastore?

First, I'm not sure where to put this post, sounds like a performance question though...

How many development VMs can be stored on an OpenFiler iSCSI datastore?

Currently I have 4 x ESX 3.5 servers all with LOCAL datastores and 160 x VMs spread out between them. 90% of the VMs are 15GB XP Pro guest with 512MB - 2045MB of RAM and performance is acceptable for testing.

I'm planning to move all the VMs to a centralized storage option like OpenFiler, upgrade our ESX servers to vSphere and implement vCenter Standard.

I'm just wondering if I will be able to run all those VMs, less-more, from one OpenFiler server. Can software/hardware iSCSI iniatores be teamed for load balancing?

Thanks!

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AlexTheBoss
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-02-2009 03:41 PM

What sort of hardware are you running openfiler on (amount of RAM, number of disks in the storage array, speed of disks, etc.)?

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jesszen
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-02-2009 04:04 PM

Maybe you can help me answer that Smiley Happy Our 160 development VMs add up to about 3.5 TB and this number is growing. I'm not sure what the OpenFIler server is going to be yet because I'm trying to figure out what it will need. My biggest concern is the network bottleneck between the 4 x ESX host and the NAS datastore (OpenFiler). As I mentioned, with all these VMs running locally on their respective ESX servers, performance is acceptable (not great). What kind of OpenFiler server(s) would I need for acceptable performance?

Jess

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AlexTheBoss
Contributor
Contributor
‎12-03-2009 07:31 AM

Here is what I would do if I were taking on the project (this isn't scientific, but it should give you some ideas to get started).

Take the number of disks that you are currently writing data to across the 4 servers and build you an array with that many data disks. Then, if you are using at least the same speed of drives as your current hosts, you should get close to your current disk I/O capabilities. If you are trying to go cheap, you can get an inexpensive external enclosure from a place like www.pc-pitstop.com. If you can afford it, increase the number of disks and build a RAID 10 or RAID 50 array for some additional performance.

In the server that you are connecting the enclosure to, make sure you have plenty of RAM (say 4 to 8 GB) and 2 to 4 gigabit NICs for iSCSI traffic. You'll have to figure out the network load balancing though.