Recommendations regarding FreenNAS NFS datastore for VMWARE

[wla]

Hi,

some recommendations regarding NFS datastore for VMware for current build FreeNAS-11.2-U6?
We intend to use FreeNAS on an older DELL R320, 192 GB RAM, HBA PERC H310 with 8x 4 TB SSD SanDisk Ultra 3D, a RAIDZ2 pool and expect "good" performance.
NFS version NFSv3 vs NFSv4? sync? compression? Other ...?

Thanks,
Walter

 

[Heracles]

HI,

First recommendation is don't do it as you described... You said you would do Raid-Z2. A single vDev will give you the performance of a single physical drive. To serve a remote datastore for ESXi, you will need a max of IOPS. You would be better to do the equivalent of Raid-10 (a pool of 4 mirrors) for that. Also, ensure you will not load that pool above 50%. Best would be to keep it at 25% or less.

I would also go for iSCSI instead of NFS to host a datastore for ESXi.

Using NFS, either you do sync write and end up terribly slow or you do async writes and turn to higher risk of corruption.

Compression with lz4 can help performance by reducing the mount of data to read / write on disks. Disks being the slowest part, it is good to do as little as possible. Dedup is to be avoided at all cost. Encryption is also a much higher risk than anything else, so another don't.