ESXi 4.1 DS1512+ NFS or iSCSI

[gurufarmer]

I have 2 ESXi hosts at home and an looking for central disk to use as a shared datastore as well as storage for media files for DLNA and other stuff. I'm looking at getting a DS1512+ once the BBOD issue is taken care of. It looks like VMware has certified the DS1512+ for iSCSI but does anyone have any experience as to if iSCSI or an NFS share has better performance? Currently I only have an unmanaged 1GB switch but if needed I will purchase a managed switch to setup Link Aggregation but want to see if it will be a requirement before I spend the money on a switch.

[hans_lenze]

Performance is mostly limited by your disks. Five SATA spindles can only provide so much performance... I'd go with NFS since there are a some problems with the iSCSI daemon and stability. Both iSCSI and NFS support thin provisioning and Synology just doesn't offer any vStorage APIs for Array Integration so true hardware acceleration is out of the question.

Link aggregation is nice but won't add that much to the setup. You'd have to use a special multipath extention to make ESXi use the extra bandwith for storage, which Synology just doesn't offer. You could use the second NIC to make a dedicated storage network. That way your DLNA streams won't impact your datastore performance from a network perspective.

[gurufarmer]

I'm planning to start with 3 drives in the DS1512+ but will probably expand it to 5 fairly quickly. I currently have 10 VMs running and some of them will stay on the local disks and none of them are real I/O heavy so I don't expect any issues. They are all running between 3 local SATA drives now 1 on one host and 2 on the other and all have very good response times so hopefully it will stay that way once I move them to the NAS.

I might dedicate 1 NIC on the DS for ESX storage and then use the other for DLNA and other storage requirements and backups.

[Clipp]

I'm planning to start with 3 drives in the DS1512+ but will probably expand it to 5 fairly quickly. I currently have 10 VMs running and some of them will stay on the local disks and none of them are real I/O heavy so I don't expect any issues. They are all running between 3 local SATA drives now 1 on one host and 2 on the other and all have very good response times so hopefully it will stay that way once I move them to the NAS.

I might dedicate 1 NIC on the DS for ESX storage and then use the other for DLNA and other storage requirements and backups.

Did you try this out yet? This is fairly close to the setup I'm thinking of implementing.

[gurufarmer]

I did get this setup. Current setup is a Gig network with a DS1512+ running 4.0-2228 and I have 3 3TB seagate drives in it and setup a 2TB LUN it actually had to be configured to 2047MB as ESXi 4.1 cant connect to a full 2TB LUN. I have had 10 VMs running on the DS for about 3 weeks with out any issues. I have rebooted the ESXi hosts to do updates and vMotion and Storage vMotion also work flawless. Currently I only have 1 NIC on the DS and 2 NICs on both ESX hosts and its been very stable even putting very heavy loads directly to the DS and also from a desktop to the VMs. I am very pleased with the performance and stability so far actually exceeding what I though this thing could do.

I would make sure you are running DSM 4.0-2228 or newer becuase I have seen complaints that the older version of DSM has issues with iSCSI stability.

Next thing I want to setup is LUN backups to backup the LUN to a local USB drive. Currently I'm only backing up the data on the DS and my VMs using backup exec to tape.

Their are a few things I with these units had and a few tings that I wish they did different/better but I'm a very happy customer and very satisfied with my purchase.