Storing vdisk domains on fast remote (LAN) storage


akashb1

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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:

 

  1. Can I just put UNRAID on the SSD NAS?
    1. Yes, but there's not enough cores to really make it a good VM host.
  2. Can I put cache drives in the Unraid machines?
    1. 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:

  1. 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 :)

 

Edited by akashb1
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