VMWare FN 9.10 iSCSI vs NFS

[Spence]

I know this is probably tired and repetitive but... I haven't played with FreeNAS since 5.x days am I'm sure a lot has changed.

I'm setting up 9.10 with 2 identical servers, 64GB RAM, 16 x 800 SSD and have 2 x 10 GBe connections. I need to serve 10~20 VMs using VMWare 6.5.

Nfs vs iSCSI ? Thoughts.

RAID 50? More usable space 2 x redundant.

Best Practice on FS for speed + reliability etc.

Thanks in advance!

 

[bigphil]

I prefer to use iSCSI over NFS on FreeNAS as it supports all of the block VAAI primitives.
For VM's, the best practice is to use mirrored vdevs for IOPS performance.
If you're using an all flash pool, I'd slap a PCIe flash based card in each NAS an configure it as a SLOG.
if you go with iSCSI, you need to use device based zVol to support VAAI and should set the ZFS option "sync=always" on the zVol.

 

[Spence]

One other thing... I'm using a P410 for RAID, is it still like the old days where it's best to let FreeNAS run the raid as software?

 

[bigphil]

One other thing... I'm using a P410 for RAID, is it still like the old days where it's best to let FreeNAS run the raid as software?

Yes, same principal still applies. The P410 is no good for this as it doesn't support JBOD or passthrough mode. Each disk in a RAID0 is also not a good idea. You need a true HBA card.