Where to store VM disks

[TravisT]

Hi all,

Quick question on what makes the most sense. I am currently running VMWare ESXi on an old host and using iSCSI from my FreeNAS box over to this host. I just purchased a Dell R720 that I will be moving my ESXi box over to. I will be running ESXi off a USB drive, but I'm wondering the best method for my VM data disks. I currently have to mirrored sets of two striped disks for my iSCSI zvol.

I think there are a couple ways to approach my new setup.
1. Keep the existing configuration and have my current FreeNAS server host the zvol for my VM disks.
2. Host a FreeNAS VM that serves iSCSI virtually to the ESXi physical host. This would not require the traffic to flow over the physical network adapter.
3. Use the onboard RAID controller in the R720 and do a RAID10 setup on the physical machine.

Is one of these ways better than the other when it comes to performance or data security?

 

[Heracles]

Hey Travis,

I would go first with a local raid 10 in the ESXi host. The worst would be the virtual FreeNAS. It would just add logical layers and processing between the same logical source (ESXi) to the same physical destination (Local drives). Better go straight from A to B than doing such a detour.

iSCSI served from an external FreeNAS is another option and actually, you can do both : Have a local datastore and an iSCSI one. This is exactly my case here. Some VM disks are hosted locally and others are from iSCSI. That way, I spread my R/W requests over as many drives as possible.

Have fun playing with your new toys,

 

[TravisT]

Thanks for the reply. I didn't get an alert, so I'm just now seeing this.

I will likely do a mixture of both, at least in the beginning. I have a brand new 1TB SSD that I plan to install in the 720, but will leverage the existing spinning mirrored stripe until I transition completely over to a mirrored/striped SSD locally on the new server.

I've really grown to like (and trust) ZFS over the many years I've been using it now, which is the reason that I even considered this. I'm really trying to get my home setup more stable, and hope this addition will help with that.