What NAS device? Any recommendations

[fox1977]

Hi folks,

Just need a bit of advice. I have just got the go ahead to go and buy a big server to run vmware starter edition and virtualise 5 of our development servers. I had been thinking about getting two of these Netgear readynas 2 tb boxes:

http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NVPlus

Just been reading a few things on these forums and the performance looks terrible. I am looking to buy some kind of 2 tb storage NAS in the next week or two. Anyone any good recommendations for NASs that work well with vmware?

I'm a bit new to vmware and I was thinking of having the vm images stored on the NAS devices.

Any tips and advice greatfully received.

Thanks

[mike_laspina]

Hi,

Lots out there! Here is a cool new direction using ZFS. You would not need the X4500 but this is an example system configuration . White boxes work as well and its very fast

[tlyczko]

Hello Mike,

Thanks for your suggestions -- I read everything and it does look interesting even though I can't claim anywhere near as much experience with *nix/solaris as you can, having worked with Windows for so long.

It seems that one has to buy a certain amount of hardware to implement this, so I have to be sure I can re-use it all somehow later on.

I will re-read everything etc. though -- your DR solution looks interesting -- how much bandwidth is necessary for doing the replication and updates?? Could one do the initial replication onsite, then do the offsite replication via WAN?? We are in a rural area where bandwidth is expen$ive, e.g <1 MB upload speed at a nearby building, which may be upgradeable but I'm not sure, I don't want to upgrade until I know for sure any DR/replication could work over a slow WAN connections without saturating it and making it unusable for other things.

Thank you, Tom

[Ken_Cline]

Tom,

There is nothing wrong with the MSA - as long as you remember what it is. It is an entry level SAN. If you go in with your eyes open and not expecting miracles, then you've got yourself some fine kit. There are many, many MSA users out there who are quite satisfied with their storage solution. In a "typical" small VMware environment (two to three hosts, not too many VMs), there's no reason to expect an MSA to be sub-par.

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

TVAR Solutions, A Wells Landers Group Company

VMware Communities User Moderator

[tlyczko]

I can handle its being an entry level SAN -- I want to be certain it's a reasonably good entry level SAN that won't cause problems down the line.

Thanks a lot for your down-to-earth reminder.

If we get the SAN I can maybe fill up our above-mentioned P4 box with stuff and use it for a simple DR replication box, depending on what's possible bandwidth-wise.

Thank you, Tom

[mike_laspina]

Hi tlyczko,

Yes you can replicate locally first and the bandwidth on a delta is no problem @ 1MB/s for example if you have 10G of changed data over 24hrs that would equate to

Max available transfer capacity = 88.47G over 24Hrs uncompressed

10/88.5 = 11.2% bandwidth consumption

24Hrs * 11.2% = 2.68 hours to transfer over night @ 1MB/s

10G is significant daily change

You could even take a 1TB usb drive and use it to move the initial vmfs volume backed with ZFS uzing a simple file.

e.g.

zfs create snapshot rp1/iscsi/lun0@1st_backup

zfs send rp1/iscsi/lun0@1st_backup &gt; /usbsp1/mobile/mybackup.zfs

and on the receiving end

zpool create rp1 raidz1 c1t1d0 c2t1d0 c3t1d0

zfs create -p rp1/iscsi

zfs receive rp1/iscsi/lun0 &lt; /usbsp1/mobile/mybackup.zfs