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ReadyNAS 4220 - NFS vs. iSCSI - VMware
NETGEAR Community, We are in the process of changing our VMware infrastructure and I have run into a few performance questions regarding our ReadyNAS setup. I am hoping the experienced members c...
Yes, you should enable async if you plan to use NFS. async'll hold lots of your data in RAM and write it nicely to the disks when it has time to. Otherwise, NFS is demanding the ReadyNAS to sync the file system before taking on more data.
I don't like NFS as much because of how bad you can fragment the vmdks on btrfs.
I would recommend:
iSCSI
Thick LUN
No snapshots
Sync Writes disabled
No bit rot protection
Do not use more than 80-85% of total usable space when creating your environment.
Schedule defrag/balance to run on weekends or every other weekend.
It's what I use in my VMware environment and still working hard :)
Yes, you should enable async if you plan to use NFS. async'll hold lots of your data in RAM and write it nicely to the disks when it has time to. Otherwise, NFS is demanding the ReadyNAS to sync the file system before taking on more data.
I don't like NFS as much because of how bad you can fragment the vmdks on btrfs.
I would recommend:
iSCSI
Thick LUN
No snapshots
Sync Writes disabled
No bit rot protection
Do not use more than 80-85% of total usable space when creating your environment.
Schedule defrag/balance to run on weekends or every other weekend.
It's what I use in my VMware environment and still working hard :)
I would recommend connecting the ReadyNAS units to a UPS, especially if you wish to use NFS and enable async. We use NUT (Network UPS Tools) to share UPS shutdown commands between our NAS units.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. We do have the ReadyNAS connected to a rackmount APC UPS, but do not have it configured to automatically shutdown in the event of a power failure. My initial approach is to make sure the ESXi guests and hosts have shutdown gracefully prior to the ReadyNAS. I will look at NUT to see if it is a viable solution for our scenario. Thank you,
Kevin
Thank you very much for taking the time to provide helpful information. Based on your post and further research I am going to use iSCSI. Do you have a recommendation or preference for iSCSI "Sync Writes?" I have not had time to test whether or not sync writes have a significant impact on iSCSI performance. Thank you,
Kevin
For Virtualisation you should disable Sync Writes. Again safe shutdown using the UPS is strongly recommended when disabling sync writes.
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