Hi all, I am new to FreeNAS and have never installed it. Some folks I work with have though and we are leaning towards using it as the basis for shared storage for a small VMware farm that will serve one or 2 production machines and a sizable lab. This is for a small company so "sizable" means we'll probably have the following basic requirements:
I have been reading several forum threads and researching VMware storage requirements. However, I have some basic questions:
In terms of hardware, I am looking at some sort of mobo to go in this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152095. In conjunction with the questions above, I am wondering what ballpark i need to be in regarding the RAM and CPU in order to get sufficient performance.
I want to stress that this is for 2 production AD machines and a lab for a company that has less than 100 employees, and given the law of averages we expect the lab to only have 1-5 people in it normally. Maybe 2-3 times a year we will run some sort of exercise and get 20 people in there concurrently for a few days. The type of use will be people running vulnerability scanners; applying security configuration baselines to various technologies (AD, SQL Server, etc) and performing usability testing; performing basic configuration of security technologies; performing penetration test exercises; performing forensics exercises; etc. We will not be doing any sort of testing with massive data sets or anything.
TIA,
bigboi
- approximately 1TB of storage needed for VMs
- we will be using snapshots so i'm roughly planning to need 2TB total
- the only production servers will probably be 2 domain controllers hosted on physically separate ESX servers
- all totaled we are talking about maybe 40 VMs at most
- the rest is for a lab which will represent a sort of generic windows network (with some *nix machines) and probably never need to support more than 20 concurrent users who could all be on different VMs within the lab
I have been reading several forum threads and researching VMware storage requirements. However, I have some basic questions:
- Can I get sufficient performance from normal 7200 RPM HDDs for this?
- Will I need to add a separate device (SSD) for ZIL to get good performance?
- When referring to improving performance, everyone always seems to refer to a ZIL device. Why wouldn't I be able to just add more RAM to improve read and write performance?
In terms of hardware, I am looking at some sort of mobo to go in this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152095. In conjunction with the questions above, I am wondering what ballpark i need to be in regarding the RAM and CPU in order to get sufficient performance.
I want to stress that this is for 2 production AD machines and a lab for a company that has less than 100 employees, and given the law of averages we expect the lab to only have 1-5 people in it normally. Maybe 2-3 times a year we will run some sort of exercise and get 20 people in there concurrently for a few days. The type of use will be people running vulnerability scanners; applying security configuration baselines to various technologies (AD, SQL Server, etc) and performing usability testing; performing basic configuration of security technologies; performing penetration test exercises; performing forensics exercises; etc. We will not be doing any sort of testing with massive data sets or anything.
TIA,
bigboi
