I definitely understand that you don't want to loose data. But the other companies like Synology, QNAP, they have support that would be appropriate for a production environment?
Back end storage for ESXi Datastores and RDMs?
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How can you say you have no support to turn to when you absolutely do with a commercial product?
So as I understand it with Synology, QNAP you are buying the array hardware and software and then install your own drives?
Support costs extra for lots of commercial products. You can actually pay for support for freenas, or linux. If you're running a product you should understand how it works. Just because it's free/opensource doesn't mean it isn't reliable.
As someone who's dealt with a lot of vendors... you really need to get into the big iron etched-into-granite support contracts before you'll find commercial support worth a damn IMHO. For instance unless you're a big enterprise with a big fat volume license and premier support, MS support is flat out rubbish - and even when you're big it's still merely mediocre. Half the time it's one of my lot cracking open the debugging tools and going through gigabytes of logs and pointing out the problem to the vendor rather than the other way around.
I don't know about FreeNAS specifically, but there's hundreds of commercial vendors offering open-source based solutions (sometimes for the bare open source stuff, sometimes for the open source stuff plus their own add-ons); Zeta are one I've dealt with in the UK, similarly EnterpriseDB for Postgres support.
TLDR: commercial doesn't necessarily mean it's well-supported, and open source doesn't mean it can't come with any commercial support.
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I would never touch a synology for running VM’s... had too many hangs with such sydtems in the past.
Why don’t you look at the commercial version of FreeNAS, TrueNAS? They are supported and afaik have a good reputation.
For backup storage, I don’t see a reason not to run it on freenas.
Don’t rely on snapshots as backups though. They are, like RIAD, NOT a backup! They are just Time-Windows. If the main VMDK for a VM goes corrupt, all your snapshots die with it. Additionally, if a VM has too many snapshots or if it has an older one, the performance will suffer greatly.
Unfortunately VDP is not an option since 6.7, so you need another solution for your backups.
Why don’t you look at the commercial version of FreeNAS, TrueNAS? They are supported and afaik have a good reputation.
For backup storage, I don’t see a reason not to run it on freenas.
Don’t rely on snapshots as backups though. They are, like RIAD, NOT a backup! They are just Time-Windows. If the main VMDK for a VM goes corrupt, all your snapshots die with it. Additionally, if a VM has too many snapshots or if it has an older one, the performance will suffer greatly.
Unfortunately VDP is not an option since 6.7, so you need another solution for your backups.
Well that isn't really any issue.... Often, a lot of Storage solutions are not on their HCL, but usually that HCL is also restricted to the actual hardware that the server runs on. What matters is that your ESXi-box is compatible. As long as ESXi get's its storage fed through either FC, FCoE, iSCSI or NFS, you are in compatibility as these are all supported storage protocols. TrueNAS supports iSCSI and NFS, I actually also think FC.
That said, there isn't much for the storage to do, other than support VAAI and ensure that it provides a LUN with the proper block size. And then of course provide some decent IO.
That said, there isn't much for the storage to do, other than support VAAI and ensure that it provides a LUN with the proper block size. And then of course provide some decent IO.
But if I call VMware for an issue that is related to storage, they will tell you that its not on their HCL and so they wont be able to help.
They will never help you directly. The only thing they will support is your VMFS-partitions and the storage daemons. I’ve had a lot lot facses through the years like this and what it usually ends up with is that you have a representative from each part, so one vmware guy and one storage guy. Then, they will work together to solve the issue.
Well just so you see where I coming from, I have had an experience with VMware, they would not give support because the storage array wasn't on their HCL.
Thanks all for your input. I have decided that I will not host web sites for others as the requirements are far more than I have at the moment. How ever I will be hosting my own web sites so I'm still looking for stability in my environment.
Coreect me if I'm wrong but with the Synology, QNAP arrays you have to supply the hard/ssd drives?
Coreect me if I'm wrong but with the Synology, QNAP arrays you have to supply the hard/ssd drives?