Hi,
I'm building my first FreeNAS box with focus on using it for ESXi datastores. There will be 3 ESXi servers accessing storage on FreeNAS. Each server will have 2x 1Gbit links and FreeNAS itself will have 4x 1Gbit links.
There will be 10 - 20 small/mid spec VMs running on each ESXi servers.
FreeNAS hardware:
Chasis: Supermicro SC836 BE16-R920B
Motherboard: Supermicro X8DTi
CPU: 2x Xeon E5620/4C@2.4GHz
RAM: 24 x Kingstone DDR3 1333 MHz 2GB (24GB)
HBA: IBM ServeRaid M1115
I'm planning to have two pools:
6 x 1TB 5400 rpm WDC WD10SPCX-22H - 16mb cache avg. latency 5.5ms, internal transfer rate (max) 140MB/s
6x 500GB 7200rpm
L2ARC: Sandisk X110 256GB (MLC) - 81k / 51k IOPS, 515/465 MB/s - 80 TBW
ZIL: Sandisk U110 (SLC) - 128GB - 470/380 MB/s - 60 TBW
I've spent few days researching and still I'm not sure about few things:
1. Some people preffer NFS over iSCSI for ESXi storage. I would thought iSCSI is better and faster as you can do MPIO. I know ESXi sends everything async so I will have to set zfs to always do sync.
In my case I will be using 2 x 1Gbit links per ESXi server so in theory it should give me ~250MB/s between ESXi and FreeNAS box.
2. Is SLC SSD a must for ZIL ? Can I use MLC with higher TBW? Can you recommend any high endurace SSDs other then Intel S3500 and ZeusRAM?
3. There are mixed opinions about mirroring ZIL accross 2 SSD drives. What happens to a pool if I lose ZIL SSD drive?
4. Should I use datasets or just create zvol for each ESXi datastore?
5. What is the best way to backup VMs stored on FreeNAS? I know you can do snapshots or replication. Will it work with NFS datasets and/or iSCSI?
Any comments and suggestions are apriciated!
Thanks
I'm building my first FreeNAS box with focus on using it for ESXi datastores. There will be 3 ESXi servers accessing storage on FreeNAS. Each server will have 2x 1Gbit links and FreeNAS itself will have 4x 1Gbit links.
There will be 10 - 20 small/mid spec VMs running on each ESXi servers.
FreeNAS hardware:
Chasis: Supermicro SC836 BE16-R920B
Motherboard: Supermicro X8DTi
CPU: 2x Xeon E5620/4C@2.4GHz
RAM: 24 x Kingstone DDR3 1333 MHz 2GB (24GB)
HBA: IBM ServeRaid M1115
I'm planning to have two pools:
6 x 1TB 5400 rpm WDC WD10SPCX-22H - 16mb cache avg. latency 5.5ms, internal transfer rate (max) 140MB/s
6x 500GB 7200rpm
L2ARC: Sandisk X110 256GB (MLC) - 81k / 51k IOPS, 515/465 MB/s - 80 TBW
ZIL: Sandisk U110 (SLC) - 128GB - 470/380 MB/s - 60 TBW
I've spent few days researching and still I'm not sure about few things:
1. Some people preffer NFS over iSCSI for ESXi storage. I would thought iSCSI is better and faster as you can do MPIO. I know ESXi sends everything async so I will have to set zfs to always do sync.
In my case I will be using 2 x 1Gbit links per ESXi server so in theory it should give me ~250MB/s between ESXi and FreeNAS box.
2. Is SLC SSD a must for ZIL ? Can I use MLC with higher TBW? Can you recommend any high endurace SSDs other then Intel S3500 and ZeusRAM?
3. There are mixed opinions about mirroring ZIL accross 2 SSD drives. What happens to a pool if I lose ZIL SSD drive?
4. Should I use datasets or just create zvol for each ESXi datastore?
5. What is the best way to backup VMs stored on FreeNAS? I know you can do snapshots or replication. Will it work with NFS datasets and/or iSCSI?
Any comments and suggestions are apriciated!
Thanks