akashb1

Hey all, I have a production facility where we use lots of little VM's to run many small windows machines. Wondering what people's thoughts are about having all domains/vdisks loaded onto a central, very fast SSD NAS. Currently have 2 servers each running 5-6 VM's each. These VM's are light but need to be Windows and be used via GUI on a regular basis. UNRAID: Dell Poweredge R620 E5-2690 v2 (20/40, 3Ghz) 128G RAM Teamed 20G, can put 1 or 2x 100Gbe Unfortunately, these came loaded with PERC arrays, backplanes, cards, and drives. So they're currently 4x RAID0 arrays - 1 parity, 3 Disks to UNRAID. Not a huge fan of this. We have a really fast, large SSD NAS. Currently running Windows server, but planning on replacing that with a zfs filesystem (or something faster, still not 100% sure)... Thoughts below: Fast vdisk storage over network. What would be the best protocol here? SSD NAS Backed up frequently to slower, larger storage. So we can go full speed ahead on this SSD NAS. What would even be the best host OS? SSD NAS not purely dedicated to VM storage, need to use it as a super-quick company NAS as well (large, temporary content transfers). SSD NAS is either 1x or 2x 100Gbe. Currently 2x 40Gbe. What you're probably thinking: Can I just put UNRAID on the SSD NAS? Yes, but there's not enough cores to really make it a good VM host. Can I put cache drives in the Unraid machines? Yes, and I will, but there was a certain appeal to having the vdisks for multiple unraid machines on one central superfast location. This also helps with a bit of redundancy What I'm thinking: Is this past the scope of using Unraid as a hypervisor? Should I be running VM in VMWare or something more enterprise based? I've gone down the ESXI route before but keep getting scarred by the cost (last time it was a distributed switch thing for using lot's of VLANS). Appreciate any thoughts. Open to any and all ideas, even radical ones