Guest Performance Question (HDD)

[DeaconFrost]

I'm in the process of building an ESXi setup at home. I will list the specs at the bottom, but my main question comes down to VM performance when running from a spinner HDD. ESXi is running from a 16 USB flash drive. I have an old 64 GB SSD for storing .iso files. Now, the question is, how will the VMs perform if I have them stored on a drive like a WD 2 TB RED.

Intel Core i7-3770K
Gigabyte Z77 board
32 GB DDR3 memory
Server grade, ESXi compatible 4 port GB NIC

Mainly, I'm going to use this as a test setup, running an Ubuntu VM for learning, maybe 2 Windows 2016 servers, and a Windows 10 VM for software testing.

 

[6foot4geek]

Relatively poorly? In my experience if you are going to use spinners you want to use a RAID5? array to help boost performance or SAS drives. Using a Red (5400 RPM) is going to impact the performance of ALL the VMs on your host. I would highly recommend that you explore 7.2K drives AND a RAID 5 config since i doubt your setup will run SAS drives

 

[Eulogy]

Why would you put the ISOs on SSD? That sounds exactly backwards to me.

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

Relatively poorly? In my experience if you are going to use spinners you want to use a RAID5? array to help boost performance or SAS drives. Using a Red (5400 RPM) is going to impact the performance of ALL the VMs on your host. I would highly recommend that you explore 7.2K drives AND a RAID 5 config since i doubt your setup will run SAS drives

No, don't use RAID 5, or 6, the ZFS equivalents, or any other scheme that requires parity calculations. The calculation process will heavily throttle IOPS and general write speeds. If you need to RAID some HDDs, RAID 1 or 10 (or ZFS equivs.) are fine.

A consumer SSD is a better choice as a VM store, so long as as you recognize its limits. Even NVMe units can start to choke if too heavily burdened. But for a few lightly-used guests in a lab, I think you'd be OK. More info:
https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...e-vs-consumer-ssds-for-home-server-use.15364/
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/did-some-write-benchmarks-of-a-few-ssds.15231/

Why would you put the ISOs on SSD? That sounds exactly backwards to me.

Pretty much. The WD Red would be perfect for storing ISOs. Though somewhat better than a HDD, 64 GB SSD isn't going to be great as a VM store. General size constrictions, as well as limits to R/W speeds and IOPS are going to limit it.