Best way to provide shared storage to Windows VMs

[ttblum]

Hello,

I have a FreeNAS server set up and running OK.

I would like to be able to provide access to the FreeNAS server's storage to about 12 Win2k8 VMs running on ESX hosts. I'm hoping that the databases running on the Win2k8 VMs would be able to write out their nightly database backup files to the Freenas storage. These files are around 200GB in size each, and I can write them out to tape backup once they are on the Freenas server.

What would be the best way to provide the Windows 2k8 VMs access to the Freenas storage? Is NFS to the underlying ESX hosts possible? Is using CIFS on the VMs the best option? Or, would using NFS straight from the VMs be a better choice?

 

[bigphil]

FreeNAS will support NFS or iSCSI datastores to ESX/ESXi. The guest VM's could absolutely use CIFS as well. Which is a better choice? It depends a lot on your hardware and network setup. If you have commodity hardware on your FreeNAS system, you'll likely get crummy NFS performance with the default settings. iSCSI would be faster. CIFS would also be acceptable and an easier setup if all you're doing is copying some backup files to the NAS.

 

[ttblum]

FreeNAS can provide NFS datastores to ESX, but I'm guessing there's no way the guests would have direct access to write to the datastore directly?

If that were true, this only leaves CIFS or NFS straight from the VMs, and CIFS is still preferred for Windows?

iSCSI probably wouldn't work at all in this scenario, or be too complex, as I need to serve these same files to a Windows tape backup server. I have FreeNAS on a Supermicro server with dual 2.5Ghz CPUs, only 16GB RAM at the moment.

 

[bigphil]

Based on your first question, you made it sound like you wanted to know if you could attach NFS to the ESX hosts. So, with this new information, I think your best bet here is CIFS. Sure you could install the Windows NFS client on the VM guests, but why bother with the extra trouble...plus I doubt you'd gain any performance doing that for what you're trying to accomplish.