Hi,
I have a small company that has about 30 ESX VMs running. If we want to expand our current storage, which would be better - building a FreeNAS box, or purchasing a commercial unit such as QNAP?
Do the benefits of having VMWare supported and certified hardware outweigh the benefits of using ZFS? I spoke to several VM techs who said that FreeNAS was only supported for making backups, not be supported for production use. Not that we can afford a VMWare support contract right now anyways.
From looking, it does not look like QNAP has many features to transfer filesystem snapshots offsite like ZFS has, which would be a nice feature to have. Would it be best to use Veeam or GhettoVCB to transfer backups?
Our budget is $3000 not including drives.
Storage space about 20 TB.
In case of chassis failure, an hour of downtime or less would be good in order to switch to backup chassis.
I called QNAP, and the rep. recommended the TS870U-RP.
I don't see it as a question - you can spend your entire life self-managing custom solutions to operate cheap hardware. The likely outcome is you will run into some issue and no one will help you, and you'll just accept extended downtime as part of what you paid for. Just because ZFS has snapshot abilities, doesn't mean they are VMware aware and going to produce consistent backups, or data that you can, in any way, restore from.
You need 20TB and < 1hour downtime? I really don't believe you're looking at appropriate hardware at all.
If you’re on paid ESX(i) version, then, you can use VeeamZIP functionality included in free version of VB&R. In many ways, VeeamZIP acts as a simple zip utility. All you need to do is to select required VMs and VeeamZIP to whatever location you want to.
Otherwise (free version), the corresponding VM files can be copied via “Files” node.
Cheers.
