ESXi NAS perfomance

[donnib]

Hi,

I have ESXi installed on a Dell Optiflex 745 T6600 Core 2 (2.40GHz) and it works fine. I am using the regular HD that came with the workstation and i can run 2 Windows XP machines at the same time without problems although i see that the bottleneck for the system is disk access so without having to invest to much i want to improve that so i have two options and i need your help to understand which one would be best.

1. Buy a RAID controller and run a RAID on the workstation

2. Buy a NAS (one of the home/small business ones qNAP NAS with iSCSI) and run RAID on two HD

Which one of the options above give the best perfomance ? Are there other (cheap)options which i don't know about ?

donnib

[scowse · Accepted solution]

Don't go with the NAS - you will be disappointed.

The cheapest, fastest and best bang for buck is any old box running Centos with software RAID and iSCSI target tools. If you can't handle the command line go with FreeNAS or Openfiler (both are unnecessary layers of complexity to my mind)

I have 4 x 1TB RAID 10 (software) pulling 100MB/sec shared by two esxi boxes. You wont get much cheaper than that and the performance and reliability is hard to beat.

[donnib]

That sounds interesting. What's the min requirements for that ? I have an old Dell Intel Core D 3.0 GHz. Would that do it ? How many NIC do you have in this server ?

[scowse]

That machine will do. The iSCSI seems to like RAM but it will run OK on 2GB.

This is a headless Centos install - no gui - so specs are not critical

You can have as many NICs as you want/need - it is possible to team them but given the throughput I don't need to

[donnib]

Have one more question for you. Getting ready to build the machine and buy HDdrives. I only have space for 2 harddrives in the machines. I was thinking to buy 2 x 1 TB SATA HD and use RAID 10 as u propossed. Can i install CentOS AND use the same two HD for the storage or should i have a third drive for OS ?

donnib

[J1mbo]

How about booting the OS from flash?

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

Please award points to any useful answer.

[jjewett]

donnib,

I would respectfully disagree with option 2, iSCSI NAS. You would be much better served with a solid RAID PCI-Express controller with Cache and 2 x fast SATA drives, (read Barracuda or Raptor). If you could spring for 2 x 15k SAS drives even better. The RAID 1 configuration should be fine.

You could have ESXi run from USB if you are pressed for space. The speed from locally attached disk will trounce any iSCSI and be easier to support and manage.

Jonathan