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I am settings up my home lab and I am looking on advice on where and how to do my datastore for my VMs. Im going to buy two SSDs (250 or 500 GB) to use in a raid1 setup for datastore. For now i am going to use two 500GB 7200RPM Samsung hard drives.
My hardware:
C6100 (8x Xeon L5520, 96 GB RAM, 4 Nodes, 2x 1gbit/s nics on each node)
Whitebox (AMD x4, 16 GB RAM, 4x 1gbit/s nics)
Raid-card: M1015
The alternatives im looking at are:
Alternative 1:
All-in-one ZFS/esxi server. Use the SSDs in a solaris VM, mirror them and share the pool with NFS to esxi.
Alternative 2:
Use hardware raid on the C6100 for esxi datastore.
Alternative 3:
Use the whitebox for storage. Run Solaris native on the machine and share via NFS to esxi.
Questions:
1. Would i see a performance decrease using ZFS and sharing via NFS in comparison with using hardware raid and no NFS?
2. If using NFS for datastore it would be over a 1 gbit/s link. However 1 gbit/s does not feel to be that much, thus would this be the bottleneck since the SSDs easily does more than this 1 gbit/s?
For instance, how does it work if i move a 10 GB file on a VM or between two VMs, will this take place over the 1 gbit link or "internally" on the storage server?
3. What ZFS settings should be used on the pool for datastore? Anyone got recommendations or guidelines? For instance should i run with compression on or off?
Thanks for any input on this!
I might add that on the older whitebox i used all-in-one ZFS/ESXi before. I had a 4x2TB RAID-Z pool for VMs + other data. However using this shared via NFS i saw very poor vm performance with datastore latency spikes up to several hundreds of ms. I am still not sure why my performance was so bad.
My hardware:
C6100 (8x Xeon L5520, 96 GB RAM, 4 Nodes, 2x 1gbit/s nics on each node)
Whitebox (AMD x4, 16 GB RAM, 4x 1gbit/s nics)
Raid-card: M1015
The alternatives im looking at are:
Alternative 1:
All-in-one ZFS/esxi server. Use the SSDs in a solaris VM, mirror them and share the pool with NFS to esxi.
Alternative 2:
Use hardware raid on the C6100 for esxi datastore.
Alternative 3:
Use the whitebox for storage. Run Solaris native on the machine and share via NFS to esxi.
Questions:
1. Would i see a performance decrease using ZFS and sharing via NFS in comparison with using hardware raid and no NFS?
2. If using NFS for datastore it would be over a 1 gbit/s link. However 1 gbit/s does not feel to be that much, thus would this be the bottleneck since the SSDs easily does more than this 1 gbit/s?
For instance, how does it work if i move a 10 GB file on a VM or between two VMs, will this take place over the 1 gbit link or "internally" on the storage server?
3. What ZFS settings should be used on the pool for datastore? Anyone got recommendations or guidelines? For instance should i run with compression on or off?
Thanks for any input on this!
I might add that on the older whitebox i used all-in-one ZFS/ESXi before. I had a 4x2TB RAID-Z pool for VMs + other data. However using this shared via NFS i saw very poor vm performance with datastore latency spikes up to several hundreds of ms. I am still not sure why my performance was so bad.