FreeNAS Performace: Part 2

I should probably call this one “FreeNAS Performance: The REAL Test”…my previous performance tests were completely unfair to FreeNAS and I’d like to show what it can really do. So – what was wrong with the first tests?

  • FreeNAS needs RAM for ZFS to do what it does best
  • A single spindle just isn’t a good test for ZFS
  • Didn’t do my homework on FreeNAS or ZFS
  • FreeNAS needs RAM – more than 3GB

So here’s the new test setup – granted this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, I feel it’s enough to show that FreeNAS can and will perform.

The VMware environment is running on HP DL360G5s, as is the FreeNAS appliance. While the VMware box in this test is more beefy than the previous tests, keep in mind that it is also loaded with several other running VMs during the tests. FreeNAS Specs:

  • Dual Intel Xeon 5160
  • 16GB RAM
  • 3x 10K SAS Raid0 (stripe)
  • P400 with 256MB BBWC

I did a single Windows 7 VM install in 7-8 minutes. Boot\reboot times are excellent – sub 20 seconds…overall, performance of the VM feels great. IOMeter shows it:

This is not the same ~50 IOPS from the previous test…this is 30 times the IOPS! This is the same IOMeter test setup as before, and it is pulling 1500+ IOPS from the FreeNAS NFS datastore. The FreeNAS appliance has allocated ~3-5.5GB once this VM was up and running and during the test…clearly 3GB in the previous test was not nearly enough. Further, I do not have deduplication turned on – instead I am using compression on the ZFS Dataset. In Windows, I am showing 8.6GB space used and only using 4.2GB on the NFS share:

Additionally, I was able to copy a file to a CIFS share (all over a 1Gb network) and saw 110-130MBps.

The testing continues in Part 3!

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