Storage Recommendation for new ESXi Host

[K D]

Will be building a new ESXi Server next week. Have the parts on the way. X11SSL-CF-O/E31275 V6/64GB RAM and CSE-823TQ-653LPB Chassis.

This will be my primary Management host in my lab. The chassis has 6 3.5 hotswap bays and I can add another 4 2.5 drives with a mobile rack. Any recommendations for storage configurations? I dont anticipate more than a a few TBs of space needed but want to be able to saturate a 10GBe network.

Requirement is to provide NFS/iSCSI storage for 4 other esxi/Hyper-V hosts.

 

[gea]

Typically you can virtualise a SAN/NAS storage appliance ontop of ESXi that provides storage for ESXi and other fileserver use cases via iSCSI, NFS and SMB. My preferred storage platforms are based on ZFS and Solarish where ZFS is origin and native with best of all integration of ZFS, storage services and the OS.

For several years now, I use and offer an ESXi storage server template with OmniOS, a free Solaris fork and my napp-it web-ui that you can download and import within minutes for a ready to use webmanaged ZFS storage appliance, if you want to try, see my Howto http://napp-it.org/doc/downloads/napp-in-one.pdf

 

[K D]

Thank you. I had already downloaded it and loaded it on a test system. Still poking around. I am completely new to zfs/Unix/linux.

What is the minimum ram you would recommend for a 3 2TB mirror + slog configuration?

 

[gea]

Solarish 64bit requires around 2GB RAM to be stable - does not matter poolsize. But then your performance is as low as pure disk performance with an iops limited workload, see

How much RAM is required for ZFS?
How slow is ZFS with low RAM or readcache disabled and slow disks?

So RAM is not a need but a want.
I would use at least 4GB for the storage VM but as much as possible as this gives performance.
Count: available RAM - 2 GB for ESXi - RAM for VMs. Give the rest to the storage VM.

 

[Net-Runner]

As a more simple alternative to ZFS/Unix/Linux I would recommend you to try Starwinds StarWind Virtual SAN Free. It's free and Windows-based thus is very simple to install and configure. It is capable of providing an iSCSI-based targets with two levels of caching to speed things up. SMB3.0 and NFS are also there. May be a good fit for you.

 

[Ch33rios]

As a more simple alternative to ZFS/Unix/Linux I would recommend you to try Starwinds StarWind Virtual SAN Free. It's free and Windows-based thus is very simple to install and configure. It is capable of providing an iSCSI-based targets with two levels of caching to speed things up. SMB3.0 and NFS are also there. May be a good fit for you.

I currently am using a BTRFS based NAS setup within my ESXi host and serving up an NFS share to act as a datastore for the same ESXi host but Im interested in StarWind as I've never heard of it (and I always like to try new things!).

Is there anything that really differentiates it from other setups/solutions?

 

[whitey]

As a more simple alternative to ZFS/Unix/Linux I would recommend you to try Starwinds StarWind Virtual SAN Free. It's free and Windows-based thus is very simple to install and configure. It is capable of providing an iSCSI-based targets with two levels of caching to speed things up. SMB3.0 and NFS are also there. May be a good fit for you.

Yawn...must resist banter ...may elaborate later, mobile currently but the cringe feeling was there :-D

 

[dwright1542]

Starwinds is now Linux based as well. I don't mind SW for testing, but we moved over to Stormagic for production. There were way too many Windows "things".