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Forum Discussion
kck126
Jan 25, 2016Aspirant
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...
- Jan 26, 2016
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 :)
kohdee
Jan 26, 2016NETGEAR Expert
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 :)
kck126
Jan 28, 2016Aspirant
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
- mdgm-ntgrJan 28, 2016NETGEAR Employee Retired
For Virtualisation you should disable Sync Writes. Again safe shutdown using the UPS is strongly recommended when disabling sync writes.
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