Drive recommendations for HW RAID vm storage

[TravisT81]

I am looking to upgrade my vm storage on my esxi box and looking for recommendations for drives.  For a little while, I had a PERC5/i setup with 4 1TB drives in RAID 10.  I was very happy with the performance.  I had problems with these drives being consumer drives (lacking TLER), and they didn't play well with the PERC card.  Trying to improve my performance while keeping costs as low as possible.  This is for a home lab/network. 

Should I consider a single SSD or lean towards HW RAID compatible drives?  Which would perform better?  I have 2 PERC5/i boards available.

[golddiggie]

Do the PERC cards have BBWC??

For drives, I would get enterprise class SAS drives. If you don't actually NEED a lot of space, and care more about performance and stability (which it sounds like you do) then I would go with four 300-600GB 10k-15k rpm SAS drives.

At this point, I still think SSD drives are a bit too expensive per GB to use in this way. They are getting closer to where they need to be to become viable options, I just don't see them being there just yet. I also don't know if any actually use SAS connections on them. With the PERC5/i cards, chances are you have the single connection (connects both power and data feeds) to the drive from the card.

[TravisT81]

The PERCs do have bbwc's on them. I'm worried abot performance, but trying to keep costs to a minimum. It's not a production server by any means, but since I run my home network/lab off of it (including a virtualized NAS hosting movies, files, etc.) I want something that is at least somewhat stable.

I think the drives you mentioned are out of my price range at this point. I'll double check to see. I have the SATA breakout cables for my PERC boards, and as of now they are connected to WD green drives iirc. If I could modify the tler settings on these dives, they would work perfectly for me, but since that feature has been disabled, looks like that's out of the question.

Right now I have a 1TB 7200 RPM drive hosting 3 windows server 2008 r2 / 1 windows server 2003 r2 / 1 FreeBSD (FreeNAS) server, and it runs OK, but as you can guess, has much room for improvement.

That's why I was considering possibly running one SSD as opposed to buying multiple enterprise SAS or SATA drives for the PERC. Wouldn't have the redundancy of a raid 10, but the price tag would be much lower as well. I'm not sure how much space I'm currently using now, so not sure if one SSD would even cut it.

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[golddiggie]

You need to figure out how much space you need first...

I would go a different route than having a VM on the host acting as an iSCSI SAN/NAS... Get an actual iSCSI NAS and then use IT for your storage needs. I acually do this in my home lab. I have a QNAP 5 drive bay device (dual Gb NICs) setup with 1TB drives under a RAID 5 configuration. I have iSCSI LUNs on it, as well as storage available for other systems. I also have ESXi 5 running from an 8GB USB flash drive for my ESXi host server. So, zero hard drives inside the host box. I have PLENTY of space for my VM's, and enough (for now) for my other needs. I do need to either get more storage, or clean up the regular shares.

IMO, breaking your storage away from the host (physically) means that if/when the host goes down, your storage does not. It also means that if/when you add a second host server, you can use additional features for HA and VUM. It also means that you can setup the LUNs to the size needed without having to worry about internal RAID controller limitations.

I have had one hard drive fail in the array over the past three years (or so). The QNAP device showed me the failed drive, and I was able to install my cold spare to replace it. I then had Seagate replace it (still under warranty) without issue. So I have a cold spare drive yet again.

[TravisT81]

That's a good point, and at one time it was setup that way. I was running openfiler, which is (was) opensolaris based. There were some issues with it, and ultimately I scrapped it. I was glad to only need one server to run everything, as it runs 24/7.

I really like freenas, and now that I've been using it for a whole, I'm comfortable enough to rely on it to host the VMware datastores on its own machine. I may consider this in the not-to-distant future.

I would still like to find some storage that is faster for my vm's in the mean time. This could even be transitioned over to the nas for use in serving up the iscsi targets in the future.

The only problem with storage being available if the esxi host goes down is that my nas is integrated to AD, so if that goes down the shares wouldn't be accessible anyway.

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[golddiggie]

With the NAS/SAN I have, I've assigned static IPs to the NIC(s)... So, even if DNS/DHCP goes offline, I'll still be able to reach the storage.

If you're concerned about your host going offline, and important things (to you) then being offline for an unknown period, setup a second host. I plan on having a second ESXi 5.x host server online before the end of this year. This will allow me to do additional things in my lab.

Seriously, I wouldn't keep VM's on DAS/local storage (to the host server) at all. QNAP has more than a few chassis (you can fill them with drive you pick up) that are just about dead silent when running. Of all my hardware making up my home lab setup, my 24 port [HP Procurve 2510G] switch is the loudest. My host is dead silent, and runs far cooler without hard drives inside it.

If you're looking for cheap but good (almost an oxymoron) then look at the Seagate Constellation drives (http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/3-5/constellation-es/). At least their not desktop grade drives, and have good MTBF numbers (1.2 million hours).

I don't see SSD drives having the cost per GB ratio/numbers needed to compete. At ~$260 for 2TB (model ST32000645NS) you'll be lucky to get a 240|256GB SSD for about that. Granted a year ago, you'd be looking at a 64-128GB SSD at that price.

[TravisT81]

Right now, my NAS/esxi box has 15 3.5" hot swappable SATA drive bays, and that setup works really well for me. I've heard good things about the qnaps as well, but they can't compare to the capabilities I have in my box. I also like the fact that freenas does zfs, which was one of the major deciding factors on going with freenas when the osol build I was using got buggy on me.

As far as reaching the storage in the event of a failure of ESXi, it's not that the box would be unreachable from the network, it's just that the NAS permissions are AD integrated, so if my virtual AD DCs are unavailable, the nas will not be able to validate permissions with the DC, so the files will be inaccessible.

I had two dell 1750's running esxi a while back, so I know all about noise! Now the loudest thing in there is either the Cisco 3640 or the 3750.

I'll check out those drives. Thanks for the advice and recommendations.

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