Use NAS as data store for VMWare ESXi?

[els]

I ponder about having FreeNAS once again - I acquired NAS appliance a few years ago so abandoned the idea of building my own. At this point in time, I have a couple VM's running on local data store and do not a good / robust backup strategy other than shutting a VM down then back up the VM to NAS appliance - one at a time. I see two options here - build new ESXi machine with hardware RAID controller - more likely RAID 10 and the storage will be dedicated to VMs only. Or build NAS but I've seen mixed feedback on ZFS as data store for VMware ESXi. I've read cyberjock's excellent presentation on ZFS.

I believe the cost to build new ESXi machine or new machine for FreeNAS will be about the same. If I were to build new NAS, I would need to get minimum 32GB ram to start with, mirrored vdevs appear to be a better choice over raidz in terms of performance, and multiple NIC's - probably 4 and use 2 as round robin between NAS and ESXi host (not sure if I'd have direct link between ESXi and NAS or through managed switch). I think I can use existing ESXi host and move data store to NAS. This approach would allow me to upgrade ESXi host down the road. I'm hoping some folks here have such setups and provide feedback whether I should go this route. I certainly don't want to make an expensive mistake.

Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[jgreco]

Fortunately much of what makes for a good FreeNAS box also makes for a good ESXi host, so to retain maximum flexibility, be sure to follow the hardware suggestions sticky and then filter that through the ESXi whitebox database ... which should help comfort you that you are not making an expensive mistake. The NAS datastore is likely to be slower than DAS but if you've come here knowing that 32GB and mirrored is going to do better, you probably don't need to be told that.

There are extensive discussions of ESXi and NFS vs iSCSI, sync writes, etc. on the forum. If you go mirrored vdev, then you get to avoid all the drama about iSCSI volblocksize and related fun.

 

[els]

So you're saying that I should go with "all-in-one" route? FreeNAS would be VM. I'll check out the hardware suggestions. I anticipate there would be a bit of performance hit when moving VM's to shared storage but this will give me redundancy. With my current setup, if the hard drive on ESXi machine goes bad, it will take me a day or two to restore all VM's from NAS to new hard drive. I want to minimize the downtime.

 

[els]

Also, I will be going with Supermicro and ECC ram - I've had good experience with Supermicro and ECC as well as Supermicro chassis. My current ESXi machine is Supermicro and my pfSense box is Supermicro as well. That being said, I haven't decided which Supermicro mainboard to go with for NAS but no doubt about it - 32gb ECC ram to start with. Should I consider SAS hard drives? I'd like hot-swappable bays and not sure if onboard SATA controller would suffice and whether I need to go with HBA controller. I'm still reading hardware suggestions on this forums.