I have a stable Esxi 6.5 host running with a small SSD boot drive and a 1TB Samsung 960 Evo for the datastore, running half dozen windows VM's for a home lab. The VM's currently all use virtual NVME controllers to talk the their VHD's on the datastore. I have a large amount of ECC RAM (by home lab standards, or at least my own)-- 256 GB-- and am not CPU limited either for typical usage.
I'm experimenting with increasing the responsiveness of the VM's, including reboot times. I'm evaluating FreeNAS as a VM on the same host.
Typical VHD size is < 100GB, but that is heavily duplicated across the VM's. With efficient deduplication I could run them all out of system RAM ; but Esxi apparently only supports very small RAM caches. Of course, Windows does file caching itself, but that's very RAM inefficient (doesn't take advantage of the heavy reduduncy between the VM's, and doesn't help with reboots).
So, I've discovered FreeNAS. It may be overkill for my applications: I'm still only planning on using the one NVME drive! But, FreeNAS appears to have a stack of useful features: Efficient deduplication and RAM caching. I can passthru the whole NVME drive to FreeNAS and give it dedicated (reserved) RAM on the holst, and I'm willing to work with write back caching mode for my applications. OTOH, a FreeNAS VM on the same machine might (?) be bottlenecked by its own VMXNet3 virtual NIC.
So the question is: Is this likely to speed up the performance of the VM's ? Is it worth the additional complexity of installing FreeNAS and migrating the VHD's to it (say, as ISCSI)?
Thanks,
LT
I'm experimenting with increasing the responsiveness of the VM's, including reboot times. I'm evaluating FreeNAS as a VM on the same host.
Typical VHD size is < 100GB, but that is heavily duplicated across the VM's. With efficient deduplication I could run them all out of system RAM ; but Esxi apparently only supports very small RAM caches. Of course, Windows does file caching itself, but that's very RAM inefficient (doesn't take advantage of the heavy reduduncy between the VM's, and doesn't help with reboots).
So, I've discovered FreeNAS. It may be overkill for my applications: I'm still only planning on using the one NVME drive! But, FreeNAS appears to have a stack of useful features: Efficient deduplication and RAM caching. I can passthru the whole NVME drive to FreeNAS and give it dedicated (reserved) RAM on the holst, and I'm willing to work with write back caching mode for my applications. OTOH, a FreeNAS VM on the same machine might (?) be bottlenecked by its own VMXNet3 virtual NIC.
So the question is: Is this likely to speed up the performance of the VM's ? Is it worth the additional complexity of installing FreeNAS and migrating the VHD's to it (say, as ISCSI)?
Thanks,
LT