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.
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.