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Forum Discussion
Which netgear nas for our smb?
Hi,
In our non-profit organization we have currently 1 ESX host with 5 Windows VM's.
- 3 of them are small stuff (antivirus, ...),
- 1 windows AD + fileserver for 30 users
- 1 small SQL server (6 users working in the application)
Furthermore, we have 2 physical server:
- 1 symantec backup exec, with a tape drive, which backups the servers trough agents
- 1 Windows Terminal Services server which has normally like 10 clients connected doing office stuff through vpn
All the servers have das storage. We would like to consolidate the storage, and serve the server storage via iscsi, and the shared files (docs and stuff) via smb.
The most import reason for this is ease of management. Also, a few of the drives are getting a bit old.
In total, we have about 1 TB of data, mostly server os files. The backup server doesn't need to go to central storage.
I thought initially about going for a readynas pro 6, but i'm afraid it won't be fast enough? Is it a good idea to fill it with 6 discs and create 2 raid groups; 4 disk raid for the slow servers, and 1 raid group for the ad and the sql server?
Mind, we're a non profit smb and cannot afford to spend 10K$ on a nas...
In our non-profit organization we have currently 1 ESX host with 5 Windows VM's.
- 3 of them are small stuff (antivirus, ...),
- 1 windows AD + fileserver for 30 users
- 1 small SQL server (6 users working in the application)
Furthermore, we have 2 physical server:
- 1 symantec backup exec, with a tape drive, which backups the servers trough agents
- 1 Windows Terminal Services server which has normally like 10 clients connected doing office stuff through vpn
All the servers have das storage. We would like to consolidate the storage, and serve the server storage via iscsi, and the shared files (docs and stuff) via smb.
The most import reason for this is ease of management. Also, a few of the drives are getting a bit old.
In total, we have about 1 TB of data, mostly server os files. The backup server doesn't need to go to central storage.
I thought initially about going for a readynas pro 6, but i'm afraid it won't be fast enough? Is it a good idea to fill it with 6 discs and create 2 raid groups; 4 disk raid for the slow servers, and 1 raid group for the ad and the sql server?
Mind, we're a non profit smb and cannot afford to spend 10K$ on a nas...
5 Replies
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- I forgot to mention: high availability is no requirement. We're sticking to 1 nas, and taking nightly backups...
- Do you think you would be saturating the gigE throughput at any point? If not, then the Pro 6 should be powerful enough -- the CPU and the RAID subsystem can handle more than 2X of the gigE throughput. That said, with 5 VMs and potentially more in the future, you may want to consider the 4200, a 12-bay rackmount with a quad-core Xeon with 10G networking. This coupled with one of the NETGEAR 10G switches would give you quite a bit of bandwidth for the VMs and capacity growth.
- I don't think we will saturate the two gigabit connections, solely based on throughput. I'm more worried about the random iops the nas with 6 spindels can deliver to the vm's. Having two databaseservers, not very heavy used, but still generating some very random db io's, i have no idea if a single x-raid2 raid volume won't slow things down.
I read in the forum that faster disks (eg velociraptors) won't deliver more throughput, because the processor is the bottleneck. But will the random io improve? - Velociraptors are not supported so what they will or will not do is a moot point. Please only use disks from the HCL.
You may wish to take a look at ReadyNAS Pro Series Performance. These results were generated when using a single NIC. Obviously using two NICs will be better.
See also The Performance Section of the Definitive Guide to the ReadyNAS 4200 - OK, thanks for all the info!
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