Vmware workstation and ReadyNAS to store VM

[ranjb]

Hi

I have just purchased a Netgear Readynas box for home (the Readnas RND2000 XRAID NAS) and it seems like a great box to keep a backup of my critical data and stream music and video.

Now that will take about 100gb in space and i'll still have 400gb odd to play with and it got me thinking if I could host all my test VM's i have created using VMware workstation, at the moment I am using a local machine but its lacks disk space, I have tried putting VM's on a external drive and performance is ok on this as well but for me it would be ideal if i could store them on the readynas and open them up through VM workstation.

Obviously putting it on a NAS box could be problematic, has anyone tried doing this on one of these ReadyNAS boxes? its probably not designed for this type of data and traffic but if anyone has got it working i'd be interested to hear any feedback.

One of the potential problems I see is I am going to be running it through a wireless router with a 4 port 100mb switch and see that as a problem, would replacing it to a gigabit switch make a huge difference or would it still be slow?

I'd appreciate any advice on this.

Thanks

[asatoran · Accepted solution]

I'm going to guess that your external hard drives were USB. In that case my answer to you is Firewire. I run many of my VMs from Firewire external drives an have very good success. While I have run some VMs from USB, USB just doesn't have the sustained performace of Firewire. This is the case on my Macbook Pro as well as my HP Pavilion (with built-in Firewire.)

That said, while I don't have experience with the ReadyNAS, I do use a Windows Server as NFS storage for an ESX server. The gigabit switch is nearly a necessity. Possible on 100Mb, but noticably better on gigabit. Additionally, the link from the ESX to the Windows NFS is over a physically separate LAN segment, so I don't have any issues with network traffic slowing down the VM. I have not tried Workstation with NFS storage, as I've always had Firewire on all my machines so I've mostly kept the VM off the network. YMMV, of course, but I suspect you may have to keep other network traffic in mind if you can't create a separate network for the NFS storage. (e.g.: no internet surfing on the host while the VM is running.)

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Is this for ESX, ESXi, WOrkstation, Server, etc?

Best regards, Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009
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[ranjb]

Its VMware Workstation version 6.

thanks