• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

ESXi virtual rdm vs passthrough performance?

A

af22

Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2010
Messages
610
Hello,

I have converted my low power file server (sig) over to a an ESXi VM.

A lot of posts and guides make a big deal about getting a hardware raid card, flashing it with an IT firmware, and setting it up as pass through device in ESXi to get the raw drives in the VM.

Currently, i'm running Server 2008R2 with windows software raid5. I needed my hard drives to pass through directly to the VM for the raid5 partition to stay intact. Because my cheap E350 setup does not support sata pass through, i was able to do it using the virtual raw device mapping instead.

Are there any cons to using virtual raw device mapping, should i work my way up to a hardware raid card? I'm still kinda new to this. Eventually I would like to switch from Server 2008 to ZFS.

Would ZFS work okay with virtual raw device mapping instead of hardware passthrough?
 
af22 said:
Hello,

I have converted my low power file server (sig) over to a an ESXi VM.

A lot of posts and guides make a big deal about getting a hardware raid card, flashing it with an IT firmware, and setting it up as pass through device in ESXi to get the raw drives in the VM.

Currently, i'm running Server 2008R2 with windows software raid5. I needed my hard drives to pass through directly to the VM for the raid5 partition to stay intact. Because my cheap E350 setup does not support sata pass through, i was able to do it using the virtual raw device mapping instead.

Are there any cons to using virtual raw device mapping, should i work my way up to a hardware raid card? I'm still kinda new to this. Eventually I would like to switch from Server 2008 to ZFS.

Would ZFS work okay with virtual raw device mapping instead of hardware passthrough?
Click to expand...

Aside from the more tedious nature of it, I believe lopetive had made comments in the past of RDM not being a 100% solution, and there being some fringe cases where issues may arise. While I have used RDM here and there, I'd definitely do a search through these forums as I know this has been brought up a few times and the issues discussed, especially if you were planning on doing a raid setup across RDM'd drives.

As a side note, the M1015's you can find for relatively cheap on ebay and have a pretty good following, assuming your board/cpu supports vt-d/iommu (sorry if what you were saying was that yours specifically does not support vt-d).
 
RDM is not recommended. My best suggestion get a real raid card. From Personal experience I run Server 2008r2 with DAS VM disks in RAID 5 works just fine.Just have good drives that have same spindle speeds.
 
Wrench00, when you say use DAS, do you format each disk as a VMFS?

I always read that VMFS was slow, hence why people created ZFS and created the VM's back to it using NFS?
 
af22 said:
Wrench00, when you say use DAS, do you format each disk as a VMFS?

I always read that VMFS was slow, hence why people created ZFS and created the VM's back to it using NFS?
Click to expand...

Direct attached storage (DAS) And yes. That's what I do performance is negligible. ZFS allows you to create iscsi and nfs stores but not its not because of that its because the storage can be shared amongst other hosts. If you got only one host I wouldn't bother. If your learning then yes by all means do NFS or iscsi but be prepared to invest money,
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top