ESXi: SSD for Datastore Guests?

[ashaneil]

An SSD (even a smallish one) for your main VM will go a long way.  I only have a 60GB SSD in my ESXi build but I only put windows XP on it and it works a treat.  It is 10 times faster running from the SSD than it ever was when running XP on my MacBook Pro.

 

So if I am planning on installing 4 VMs:

          -- unRAID --> set to 2Gb partition

          -- WinXP (FileZilla box) --> set to 25 Gb partition

          -- Win2k3R2 DC (maybe) --> set to 25 Gb partition with no pagefile

          -- ClearOS or pfense firewall distro (assuming I can make it work) --> set to  5Gb

will a 60 Gb SSD work or should I stick with a 250-320 Gb SATA drive?

[brian89gp]

An SSD (even a smallish one) for your main VM will go a long way.  I only have a 60GB SSD in my ESXi build but I only put windows XP on it and it works a treat.  It is 10 times faster running from the SSD than it ever was when running XP on my MacBook Pro.

 

So if I am planning on installing 4 VMs:

          -- unRAID --> set to 2Gb partition

          -- WinXP (FileZilla box) --> set to 25 Gb partition

          -- Win2k3R2 DC (maybe) --> set to 25 Gb partition with no pagefile

          -- ClearOS or pfense firewall distro (assuming I can make it work) --> set to  5Gb

will a 60 Gb SSD work or should I stick with a 250-320 Gb SATA drive?

 

Should.  The SATA will work too, the only heavy IO server you have in that list is the FileZilla.

 

A 2k3 DC can be done  in 10gb if you really wanted.

 

 

[WeeboTech]

An SSD (even a smallish one) for your main VM will go a long way.  I only have a 60GB SSD in my ESXi build but I only put windows XP on it and it works a treat.  It is 10 times faster running from the SSD than it ever was when running XP on my MacBook Pro.

 

So if I am planning on installing 4 VMs:

          -- unRAID --> set to 2Gb partition

          -- WinXP (FileZilla box) --> set to 25 Gb partition

          -- Win2k3R2 DC (maybe) --> set to 25 Gb partition with no pagefile

          -- ClearOS or pfense firewall distro (assuming I can make it work) --> set to  5Gb

will a 60 Gb SSD work or should I stick with a 250-320 Gb SATA drive?

 

It will work however there is not much room left over for reallocation by the firmware.

I would put environments between each drive (magnetic sata/ssd) depending on how much interactive access they require.

 

For example. once the unRAID OS boots, you do not need to access it very often.

Same might be for clearos/pfsense.

For the filezilla environment, it depends on how much interactive use vs local writes there are.

If you are writing to the local filesystem allot, then I may put that on a spinning drive.

 

If it's just a bunch of scripts /tools running in memory, I might put it on the SSD.

 

FWIW filezilla is also available for linux.

 

Other choice is to go with a larger SSD.

If you went with 80 or 120 I would say go with it. But that's me.

 

Johnm also made reference to leaving some space available in another post.

 

In one of my machines. I have a 60 GB SSD and it's using about 40% of that for linux.

Same for my windows machines.

[Johnm]

An SSD (even a smallish one) for your main VM will go a long way.  I only have a 60GB SSD in my ESXi build but I only put windows XP on it and it works a treat.  It is 10 times faster running from the SSD than it ever was when running XP on my MacBook Pro.

 

So if I am planning on installing 4 VMs:

          -- unRAID --> set to 2Gb partition

          -- WinXP (FileZilla box) --> set to 25 Gb partition

          -- Win2k3R2 DC (maybe) --> set to 25 Gb partition with no pagefile

          -- ClearOS or pfense firewall distro (assuming I can make it work) --> set to  5Gb

will a 60 Gb SSD work or should I stick with a 250-320 Gb SATA drive?

 

That's a bit much for a single 60GB SSD IMO, even set to thin. you want to have overhead on the SSD to keep from burning it out.

Also if you are backing your Guests up, some methods will need as much free space as your biggest guest usually for the snapshot while it backs up (assuming you dont down the guest for the backup).

 

That 2k3 (and 2k8) DC will run fine on a spinner. the same for the firewall.

the XP/unRAID boot will like the SSD. a 60 would be fine for that.

 

Larger is always better if you asked me. I know it is expensive. but if you have free drive space to play with, you will be a happier camper. especially for any sandbox windows guests you might build for a day and erase.

 

PS. dont be scared to build it on a spinner and migrate the guest to an SSD when you have the available funds. That is one of the beauties of virtual drives/machines. you can move/migrate/copy/port-able-ize them.

[WeeboTech]

An SSD (even a smallish one) for your main VM will go a long way.  I only have a 60GB SSD in my ESXi build but I only put windows XP on it and it works a treat.  It is 10 times faster running from the SSD than it ever was when running XP on my MacBook Pro.

 

So if I am planning on installing 4 VMs:

          -- unRAID --> set to 2Gb partition

          -- WinXP (FileZilla box) --> set to 25 Gb partition

          -- Win2k3R2 DC (maybe) --> set to 25 Gb partition with no pagefile

          -- ClearOS or pfense firewall distro (assuming I can make it work) --> set to  5Gb

will a 60 Gb SSD work or should I stick with a 250-320 Gb SATA drive?

 

Should.  The SATA will work too, the only heavy IO server you have in that list is the FileZilla.

 

A 2k3 DC can be done  in 10gb if you really wanted.

 

How much local writing will the filezilla box be doing?

[ashaneil]

How much local writing will the filezilla box be doing?

 

That depends. Download from seedbox can be around 100 Gb+ weekly though average is around 40gb. I lost couple of hard drives and have to replenish rather an re-rip. Re-rip takes far longer.

 

The plan was to use FileZilla to grab the files and copy them to the cache drive, renaming  them / scraping them once they are on the unRAID protected drives. I think I saw a post that said that it is not a good idea to write straight to unRAID.

 

So let me get this straight: I would be better off putting the VM running FileZilla on a spinner and keep the Win2k8 DC, unRAID, ClearOS, and test Windows VMs on a 80+ GB SSD?

[c3]

So let me get this straight: I would be better off putting the VM running FileZilla on a spinner and keep the Win2k8 DC, unRAID, ClearOS, and test Windows VMs on a 80+ GB SSD?

 

That is the double edge sword of SSD, they handle IO very fast, but it wears them out. So you see people trying to limit the IO load by putting low IO tasks on them, and people trying to make them last by moving heavy IO away from them. Your 5400rpm laptop drive would handle those low IO tasks, and it might last longer than the SSD under heavy IO of filezilla. Once you realize and operate SSDs as the high speed consumable, you'll be very happy. Consumer (MLC) and Enterprise (SLC) SSDs are built differently, and there is a cost premium.

 

Don't expect any storage to last forever, you'll have less stress.

[Johnm]

Put the Win XP on the SSD.. if you worry about killing the SSD, there is no point in buying it.

 

i have been non stop pounding my SSD's and they are ok so far. putting a Heavy IO task on a single mechanical drive datastore will just impact and possibly cripple all other guests on that drive.  with ssd's the lag from the high IO guest is negligible.

 

this reminds me of when touchscreen smartphones came out.. "you'll wear the touch screen out by touching it".. but umm.. yeah..

 

there is truth to that, but we tend to upgrade before we get there.

[ashaneil]

Good thing is that if the SSD was to die, there would not be anything on the SSD that is not easily recoverable. And if I keep a ghost image of the SSD handy, restoring it would be a piece of cake. Thanks for all the input guys.

 

Last thing, the files I grab from the seedbox -- move them straight to unRAID or install and use a cache drive?

[WeeboTech]

Here's what I would do.

 

Put the Operating Systems on the SSD.

 

For the filezilla machine. I would mount a protected unRAID drive on it.

I would pull the files from the seedbox to the unRAID machine.

 

I would not use the SSD's local filesystem as temporary storage.

 

As far as to use a cache drive or the protected array.

1. If my retrieves all go to one disk share, I would write to the protected array.

2. If my retrieves are part of a user share that encompass a number of drives, I would write to the cache drive

 

I've read studies where an SSD can be written at 20GB a day and last 5 years.

But since your ultimate destination is the unRAID environment use that.

 

I have not lost an SSD yet, but I do not pound on them either.

One thing I did notice.

 

On my linux host I use vmware workstation.

My windows XP session is up 24x7.

When I moved the vmdisk to a flash drive. everyday smartd would report large amounts of unrecoverable sectors going off line.

It always grew. Windows is always writing to the  SSD. I;ve since migrated back to magnetic media for that host.

The windows XP environment was real snappy for reads.

However, when the 12GB buffer cache flushed on the OS, the writes to the SSD would make the machine laggy.

So heavy writes can affect you. It will e different under ESXi since that does not do any form of caching. However I still think that heavy writes could have a larger effect.

 

In comparison my linux machine which does minimal writes has 2344 uncorrectable sectors whereas my windows vmdisk's SSD (same models) has over 200,000.

 

[Johnm]

One thing I would do for windows guests on SSD's I do disable the pagefile and indexing. if you cut back as much unessisry windows writing, I am sure it will help.

 

I think they have pretty much proved that most of the "SSD is going to fail" is a lot of paranoia.

 

As long as you dont fill it up 100% then do a lot of data writing to it (im talking 1000's of megs a day). it should have a nice happy long life.

 

My ssd unraid cache drive has seen up to 12-15 TB of data writen/erased across it in the 2-3 months it has been in service. i do have it set to leave 20gb space on it.

[WeeboTech]

I think they have pretty much proved that most of the "SSD is going to fail" is a lot of paranoia.

 

Considering all the negative posts on newegg reviews, I wonder about it.

Still I use them normally and just back them up frequently.

 

Almost all my SSD machines have a hard drive on them, So I usually do a monthly copy of the partition to a reserved section on the magnetic hard drive.

[Johnm]

I believe those reviews for failing SSD's are for the firmware bug where the drive vanishes from the bios and is 100% unreadable. I have experienced this myself in the past.

this has been fixed recently to my knowledge.

 

Also, i would guess there might be a few DOA's but nothing like the DOA count on a mechanical drive.

 

I am referring to mass failures of the sectors themselves.

yes, sectors will fail, but not at the alarming rate people are predicting.

most are trying to imply the drive will be toast in a few months.

they have proven that's not the case.

The ssd's should last almost the same as mechanical drive put under the same stress.

 

Don't get me wrong, I am not preaching SSD's are the gods of the computer world. but, they are the future and were we are going. we need to have some trust in them.

I would love to see some new data on failure rate of real world testing.

Newegg reviews tend to be tweens that are computer illiterate. 

[WeeboTech]

I have not had any SSD's fail on normal interactive usage.

 

However, I did see an alarming number of uncorrectable sectors grow daily on my vmware workstation's XP vmdisk.

It grew by thousands every day. This is an XP instance with no pagefile and 2GB of ram up 24x7.

 

Granted it was a 20GB XP vmdisk on a 60GB Vertex, so I'm sure I would have been OK. Yet it was still alarming.

 

I think the people who have such catastrophic failures do all sorts of testing, game loading and deletion which does not help the life of the drive.

 

If I needed to edit massive files or I had a heavy I/O OS. I would install an Acard RAM Disk.

For now, I installed a Gigabyte i-Ram disk and use 1/2 for a pagefile and the other half for temp space.

I know you can use a ramdisk for XP, but these instances are 32bit. In any case.

I'm sure most basic usage of an SSD is fine. It's just that the recent negative posts on SSD's over the past year or so has me concerned.

 

I would only invest in a premier name brand solution at this time. But that's just me.

[Johnm]

that does not sound right...

 

I decided to take a look at my Cache Drive SSD to see if it is really as much data as I thought.

It looks like it was not AS much as I thought, But close.

 

I ran some SMART tools.

I humored myself and ran SSD life also.

 

Both tools showed 12.5 TB of data written and 19 TB of data read from my cache drive and it is is in Excellent health.

The smart reports showed nothing bad.

 

[WeeboTech]

My usage is high, I Leave a windows XP session on 24x7 while my mail client open all the time.

I have it checking many different email addresses.

Plus I use the XP vmware environment for regular daily internet access.

Since I'm single and unattached, I'm at my machine most of the day doing various remote tasks.

 

I don't play games or anything like that, but I never turn it off.

I've seen the same results for two different vertex drives.

 

I'm sure XP on a vmware disk which resids on top of ext3 on an SSD (like that) is not the most efficient use.

 

It's also one of the reasons I lobbied for ext4 support in unRAID. ext4 supposedly supports trim. If the cache drive were to use ext4, then we would have good support for the ssd.

 

[Johnm]

I'm sure XP on a vmware disk which resids on top of ext3 on an SSD (like that) is not the most efficient use.

I'll agree there. in addition XP is not SSD aware to complicate it more.

 

I do have a 2k8 guest that is constantly 24x7 writing to a database and making temp files for every usenet download i grab.

That would be millions of photos and rar files.

 

I should take a look at that drive and report back what sort of damage i have done in the last 6 months to it.

[WeeboTech]

At the very least you've shown me a cool tool. I'll check out that SSDlife program. Thanks!

[ashaneil]

For the filezilla machine. I would mount a protected unRAID drive on it.

I would pull the files from the seedbox to the unRAID machine.

 

I would not use the SSD's local filesystem as temporary storage.

 

As far as to use a cache drive or the protected array.

1. If my retrieves all go to one disk share, I would write to the protected array.

2. If my retrieves are part of a user share that encompass a number of drives, I would write to the cache drive

 

Hi Weebo,

Sorry but I don't what you mean by "I would mount a protected unRAID drive on it".

 

Depending on whether I am downloading movies / tv shows, all the movies would be in their own folders but these folders may/will be spread across multiple disks while the TV shows will be on a same disk for the entire show.

[Johnm]

I think webo is suggesting that you map an unraid share in your Win XP guest. Then write your torrents directly to the shared drive map.

 

For my usenet downloading guest, i have my cache, temp files databases on the SSD. 

BUT... I have a second VMDK mechanical drive for that guest that is dedicated for the end files (similar to your completed torrents). those completed files are then moved to my array via other programs/scripts once complete.

 

In a way, I do what Webo suggests, but i use a virtual drive for the bulk of my transferable data. that way my array can spindown and is not taxed by 24x7 access

 

so i guess i do it this way... 1 windows Guest with 2 virtual drives.

VMDK1 > 30GB (part of a 120GB Datastore SSD)Windows + dowloading app and cache/temp files/database

VMDK2 > 500GB (part of a 2TB datastore spinner) Windows storage drive attached to above guest.

My scripts then move any completed file to my unraid SDD cache drive, this then moves to the unraid with the mover.

 

This turns out to be very efficient. for me and uses as little power and system resources as possible.

you could bypass the second spinner and write directly to your unraid cache drive. this would be almost as efficient depending on your downloading speed and impact.

 

My torrent guest is just on a 100mb VMDK on a spinner. but i hardly ever use torrents to be honest. When I do, it is like 1 or 2 files every 6 months.

 

[WeeboTech]

For the filezilla machine. I would mount a protected unRAID drive on it.

I would pull the files from the seedbox to the unRAID machine.

 

I would not use the SSD's local filesystem as temporary storage.

 

As far as to use a cache drive or the protected array.

1. If my retrieves all go to one disk share, I would write to the protected array.

2. If my retrieves are part of a user share that encompass a number of drives, I would write to the cache drive

 

Hi Weebo,

Sorry but I don't what you mean by "I would mount a protected unRAID drive on it".

 

Depending on whether I am downloading movies / tv shows, all the movies would be in their own folders but these folders may/will be spread across multiple disks while the TV shows will be on a same disk for the entire show.

 

Then I would download to a hidden folder on the cache drive then move them to where they need to be moved to, either on the cache drive and let the mover do it overnight or to the protected array.

It all depends on how much you will write a day and how badly you want to spin down that one drive.

 

Since I've been computing from that days back in BBS dial up, I've not had an issue with a couple drives that spin all day.

Some people do.

 

The other caveat is when you do heavy writes to the cache from another machine, it may impact your downloading machine's performance. I've not had the issue, but the potential is there.

 

Either way, I would keep my leeching directory off the SSD, even if I had to install a single 500GB drive or use a fast magnetic spinner datastore VMDK just for the leeching.

In fact, that's what I do with my mini-itx torrent machine.

 

Windows XP on intel 40gb SSD. Leeching and Seeding until ratio torrents on a WD Green 500GB drive.

Move to array when ratio is reached.

I have a mobile 2.26ghz processor for this machine. Very low power, like a laptop. I use rdesktop to manage it.

[Johnm]

duhh you said filezillia.. I don't know why I thought you said torrent.. long night last night.

 

 

[WeeboTech]

Just for comparison, this is one of the drives that was an ext3 disk with a vmware disk, supporting 1 windows XP instance  (nothing else)

The XP environment was up 24x7

 

Since I saw so many uncorrectable sector errors, I reassigned it to my Windows 7 HTPC

 

[Johnm]

Just for comparison, this is one of the drives that was an ext3 disk with a vmware disk, supporting 1 windows XP instance  (nothing else)

The XP environment was up 24x7

 

Since I saw so many uncorrectable sector errors, I reassigned it to my Windows 7 HTPC

 

Drive heath excellent.. yeah..

 

that is pretty bad.

that is a bit of an older drive (with low milage) an MLC drive.

I do see what you meant though. .

 

it looks like you are not alone on this particular drive and its  early failing. a little googling and ther eare may people saying similar things about it.

i would like to think the newer drives are more resilient.

 

any chance it is still under warranty?

[WeeboTech]

Just for comparison, this is one of the drives that was an ext3 disk with a vmware disk, supporting 1 windows XP instance  (nothing else)

The XP environment was up 24x7

 

Since I saw so many uncorrectable sector errors, I reassigned it to my Windows 7 HTPC

 

Drive heath excellent.. yeah..

 

that is pretty bad.

that is a bit of an older drive (with low milage) an MLC drive.

I do see what you meant though. .

 

it looks like you are not alone on this particular drive and its  early failing. a little googling and ther eare may people saying similar things about it.

i would like to think the newer drives are more resilient.

 

any chance it is still under warranty?

 

I really think it's more of a situation with linux -> vmware -> vmdisk -> XP NTFS filesytem and XP running 24x7.

 

Two different drives of this brand exhibited the same behaviour, yet the one in my other linux machine without the vmware/vmdisk/xp environment is very low errors.

 

Newer hardware may be different. We'll see.

In any case, for a download machine, I would use a magnetic drive for the download repository. 

I'll try and capture an SSDlife snapshot on my bittorrent machine.

 

EDIT:

FWIW, I know the OCZ Vertex was used heavily with that particular Windows XP instance. It was my main internet access station.

It was up 100% of the time. I never turn off that particular Linux environment and it's virtual machines.