Virtualization, EUC, and Computing in General
Let me preface this post with 2 things: It’s going to be short and sweet It assumes you’re using NFS for your datastores (which you should be – since writes are SYNC, the snapshot should be clean) First, you need somewhere to move the backing files – in my case, I take a tiered storage approach. VMs run on several spindles of 10K SAS; CIFS storage is on a few 2TB SATA drives; offsite is … Read more…
I see a lot of posts on the FreeNAS forums asking about performance for VMware\Hyper-V or any other hypervisor using FreeNAS as the backing storage for virtual machines. Then I see the specs of the systems those people are looking to build or already have built and I frown a bit. First, let me say that FreeNAS is more than capable of handling the task of storage for your home virtual lab – if you … Read more…
I’ve been testing FreeNAS lately – connecting ESX hosts via NFS for virtual machine storage. Being POSIX compliant, ZFS must abide by any calls made with the o_sync flag set meaning essentially that all disk activity must be written to stable storage before success is returned. This includes most commonly databases, file server operations and most importantly NFS. This means that the ZIL (ZFS intent log) will be used as a special place on disk in the pool … Read more…
I recently storage-VMotion’d all of the lab home lab VMs over to FreeNAS based storage. It is an NFS share based on 4 10K 146G spindles configured for RAIDZ – deduplication is turned off, instead opting for lzjb compression. The physical specs of the FreeNAS host are the same as in this post. Keep in mind that there are several other VMs banging away at these 4 disks. That said, 75% write\25% read (75% random) is considerably … Read more…
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 … Read more…