Planning DIY NAS for 2-node vsphere cluster - advice needed

[Jannis Jacobsen]

I posted this in the wrong area of the forum.
Hope I have better luck here

I am in the process of getting a proper 10gbit vaai supported storage solution for my home lab.
I am considering the QNAP TS-831X, as it has 2x sfp+ built-in, and vaai support + vsphere plugin.
Not sure if the performance will be good enough though.

So, I found some hardware I might purchase:

Asus P10S-M C232 server motherboard
Xeon E3-1220 V6
2x 8GB 2400Mhz ECC DDR4
Fractal Design Node 804
10x 7200 rpm 1/2 TB hdd's (not decided on drives yet)
2x 960GB Crucial M500 ssd (for cache)
Intel X520-DA2
This setup gives space for 10 3.5" hdd's + 2x 2.5" SSD's

I want to direct connect the 10gig to the 2 vsphere hosts, so I dont need a 10gig switch.

I have used Freenas before, but I'm unsure if I will get good enough performance

Does anyone have any bright and shiny ideas?
Thanks!

-Jannis

 

[herby]

They go on (almost annoyingly) about more ram in the FreeNAS forums a lot, but it's kind of true. I would up that some.

I was having my 10 GbE ISCSI connections timeout about once a month earlier this year and I couldn't figure out why. Since then I shuffled some RAM around with my Xenservers to bring my NAS from 16 up to 48 GB. I haven't had the timeouts since and more ARC is always handy.

I've never set up a SLOG device but those 960GB SSDs seem huge for your pool. I would think smaller faster drives would be better for that, or an all SSD pool for your VM storage if you can.

I had a 3 disk raidz pool of M500's that was alright, but recently switched to a mirrored pair of used Intel DC3500's. I plan to grow like a RAID 10 as needed.

 

[Jannis Jacobsen]

I’ll probably try to work in more memory and an intel dc s3700 100gb ssd for slog.
will try to keep from needing l2arc.
probably going to go for async too, lab is not that critical

guess I’ll get best performance going with 5 mirrored vdevs in 1 pool
(freenas zfs)


-EDIT-
Might consider going with Intel Optane Memory 32GB for SLOG, for the added performance

-Jannis