Optimal Storage Setup w/ ESX & Synology 10Gbe

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ltickett

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 27, 2000
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Essentially I'm starting with 2 hosts, each with;
4x 12-core opteron
128Gb RAM
Dual port 10Gbe NIC

And a single Synology RS3614xs with;
6x3TB WD RED (Raid 10)
2x1TB Samsung EVO 840 (Raid 1)
Dual port 10Gbe NIC

And a Negear 8port 10Gbe XS708E switch.

Initially i'm going to focus on the SSD(s) to try and get the most out of the NAS, Network and ESX.

I've been running hundreds of benchmarks using different configurations but i'm convinced i'm still far from optimal.

I have tried;

mtu1500
mtu9000
Raid 1
Raid 0
NFS (with single 10Gbe and 2x10Gbe)
iSCSI (block and file based, with and without MPIO)

I'm using Crystal DiskMark and IOMeter to benchmark. Even when I attach local storage (SSD) i'm still struggling to get anywhere near the IOPS in IOMeter that I expect to be seeing.

I think my main observations so far would be;
small improvement with mtu9000
interestingly raid 0 seems slower than raid 1
nfs performs better than iSCSI

I'm sure there are other variables (such as block size when formatting the disks in windows).

Are there any recommendations or best practice guides i could follow to try and get the most out of my hardware?

Thanks!
 
Really depends on the use case / workload that you'll actually be using... what VMs are you going to be running? Are your tests mirroring your expected uses? What kind of results are you getting versus what you're expecting?
 
Knew I missed something. I will be hosting a SQL server which will be the main culpret for disk consideration. The rest of virtual machines will be web servers (under minimal load) and Citrix servers (relatively CPU and RAM intensive).

I may draw up a grid of all the tests and redo them a bit more consistently, but I will post something rough momentarily.

Thanks
 
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You can probably tell it wasn't the most scientific of tests, and there are plenty of missing cases...

About the explanation i think is needed; the nfs dual 10Gbe tests were achieved by creating a separate VMKernel / datastore / disk (vmdk) on each link then creating a striped array in windows using the 2 disks.
 
Hang on - so you've got 6 SATA disks in a RAID 10, and you're complaining about 3500 IOPS?

What's the synology using hte SSDs for?
 
I've got it up to 31,000 IOPS now, so making good progress- it was a IOMeter configuration issue as I expected. I'm still a little unclear and imagine i don't have it configured correctly (to try and compare my benchmarks to the "advertised" IOPS).
 
Rule of thumb - ignore "advertised" anything, other than perhaps capacity.

I'm assuming here that it uses the SSD for some form of caching - sadly, their site is blocked from work for the moment (WTF?).
 
So you got all this set up, all relying on a single point of failure... your storage array...

Is this a home lab or production for work?

What is your backup plan for the storage array if it takes a crap?

Are the SSD's set up to be used as Cache or just as normal drives?
 
SSDs are just a volume not cache.

This is currently in the lab but hoping to eventually promote to production.

I'm not sure about redundancy for the NAS. Initially my intention is having component redundancy (fans, power supplies, disks etc) but if the whole unit fails i'll be relying on my DR site (veeam backups).

I have 2 hosts for HA and the 1Gbe switch will provide redundancy if the 10Gbe switch fails (at a drastically degraded performance).

If I'm happy with everything I may simply buy another of the RS3614xs and stick the 2 together in a HA cluster, but at the moment it's a big cost to justify
 
lopoetve said:
Rule of thumb - ignore "advertised" anything, other than perhaps capacity.

I'm assuming here that it uses the SSD for some form of caching - sadly, their site is blocked from work for the moment (WTF?).
Click to expand...

The only reason for trying to achieve the "advertised" is to ensure i've not done something really stupid and that i'm getting the most out of my hardware.
 
I'm starting to get my head around it all a bit more now!

I'm out of the office for a few days, but hope to post an update at the weekend.
 
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