Storage ideas for dell r720 w/8 2.5 hdd slots

[marcoi]

well I got my spare 720 case, unfortunately the hdd cage is riveted in, so after work ill be taking a drill to it im hoping it works out.
Still waiting on 9300-8i card from newegg since first one i got used for ebay was DOA. looking at the card i can see a resister is physically missing from it. Maybe when im done with this project ill try to resurrect it with replacing the resister?

Once I get all the hardware together and tested, then ill be installing ESXI as host OS. Then installing FreeNas 11 with two 9300 cards in pass-through. The local h310 card will connect to the local ssd storage for vm to live on.

 

[marcoi]

I'm please to report success!! (does help when you enlist the help of someone who knows how to do automotive body work)

Here you can see the second cage installed with the r730 sas3 backplane. The ssd sas drives will populate this bay. I have 8 more dell trays coming from ebay so i can populate all 16 spots now.

Back showing the two different back planes.

Cant wait for my 9300-8i to show up tomorrow to start building out the OS and software side.

 

[marcoi]

So I finally got my 9300-8i card and it is installed. I took down my standalone freenas and moved the 4 x 8tb red drives over to the new SM case.

Im doing some testing now. FreeNas has both 9300 cards pass through to it.


I created the following test pool.
3 x 8tb in Rz1 Raid with 2x 100 mirrored sas ssd for slog.




I created a NFS share and mounted it on the ESXI host running FreeNas so no network cards are involved. Nics and switchs are 10GB with 9k MTU.

Created a HDD thin provision and added to local Windows 10 VM to run CD. Below are the results. This is with sync = always on the pool.




What do you think? I
'm still tinkering for now.

PS without the SAS SSD

 

[marcoi]

Any ideas why my iscsi performance in W2012R2 is 1/3rd of what a windows 10 vm can do? ISCSI in windows 10 vm, on local host and a second copy on second host connected via 10GB connection get the same benchmark results, like 1500 read/write. On two separate W2012R2 images on 2nd host i see it top off at 200 range for both read and write. So it definitely seems like an issue with ISCSI in w2012r2.

Has anyone experience the same and found a fix for this?

 

[marcoi]

i found a work around. I mounted the iscsi to esxi host then added the drive as RDM to the vm host.