950Pro Samsung, ESXI 6.x and Freenas

[ALFA]

Good day fellas,

I have a little doubt (well its more an mental exercise), if I have 2x 950 pro NVMe connected to a PCIe 8x and pass through this to ESXI, create a raid 1 (mirroring ) in freenas to store the virtual machines (VM datastore) via NFS, its a good idea? it would bring some problems in the future?, it would bring a better perfomance or would only be a waste of money?

thanks for reading

 

[Rand]

I ran a "vms on 950/512 via NFS" test with less than expected speeds a couple of weeks back.
In the end it all depends on your requirements though, but a S3700 might be a better choice (or P3700 if you have the money for even better speeds)

 

[Dice]

with less than expected speeds

how much less..?

 

[Rand]

See here https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/nvme-drive-for-slog.42264/

 

[jgreco]

I guess I wouldn't expect NVMe vs SATA SSD to make a huge difference (in the case we're discussing). At a certain point, with ZFS, it isn't really the drive that's limiting you, it is all the other factors in the whole NAS stack. You can probably get yourself some nice Samsung 850 SSD's and get good performance at a fraction of the price. If you're trying to virtualize a FreeNAS to solve performance problems, you're probably doing the wrong thing.

You can get better performance for an ESXi datastore by getting a nice LSI 2208 or 3108 RAID controller with the supercap option, and then stick some inexpensive SATA SSD on there. This could be a little more expensive (~$800) than the two 950 Pro's (~$700) but once you take the hit on the RAID controller, you can add more SSD or HDD space for very low cost, which you cannot do with the 950 Pro strategy. Further, you do not lose RAM and CPU to a FreeNAS instance. And it is blazing fast. See

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/supermicro-x9srl-f-build-check.17677/page-5#post-278551

 

[ALFA]

Thanks guys, I think i will stick with the 850 EVO, this is more like personal / academic / testlab build nothing more :)