ESXi Datastore Considerations

Misan · 28 Sep 2016 at 14:54

Hi guys - I am looking at upgrading the storage on my home ESXi lab. I'm currently running around 30 VM's on a single 7200rpm SATA 3 drive and the performance is starting to become an issue (particularly during Veeam backups of the VM's to a USB drive)

The board has an onboard SATA 2 RAID controller which connects up to a SAS backplane.

I was thinking of the following two options.

Buy a refurbished IBM M1015 and flash with LSI firmware and setup a RAID 1 with an additional 7200RPM SATA 3 drive and use that as a datastore. Since I'm backing up nightly to Veeam, redundancy isn't a major concern.

Purchase two 480GB Samsung PM863 drives and hook them up to the existing onboard RAID controller. (SATA 2) - I'm looking at the Enterprise option here due to having quite a few write intensive VM's (SQL, Exchange 2013)

Obviously the latter option is a fair more expensive - but would this offer much better performance vs spindles?

Many thanks

Caged · 28 Sep 2016 at 19:27

I can't see any reason to use anything other than flash in a lab setup.

I wouldn't buy enterprise SSD though - just get normal 'good' ones and replace them when you wear them out and the cost per GB has halved again. How write intensive do you really expect a lab Exchange server to be?

ecksmen · 28 Sep 2016 at 21:14

Misan said:
Hi guys - I am looking at upgrading the storage on my home ESXi lab. I'm currently running around 30 VM's on a single 7200rpm SATA 3 drive and the performance is starting to become an issue (particularly during Veeam backups of the VM's to a USB drive)

The board has an onboard SATA 2 RAID controller which connects up to a SAS backplane.

I was thinking of the following two options.

Buy a refurbished IBM M1015 and flash with LSI firmware and setup a RAID 1 with an additional 7200RPM SATA 3 drive and use that as a datastore. Since I'm backing up nightly to Veeam, redundancy isn't a major concern.

Purchase two 480GB Samsung PM863 drives and hook them up to the existing onboard RAID controller. (SATA 2) - I'm looking at the Enterprise option here due to having quite a few write intensive VM's (SQL, Exchange 2013)

Obviously the latter option is a fair more expensive - but would this offer much better performance vs spindles?

Many thanks

"Write intensive" but you have currently a single 7.2K spindle? :confused:

For what it's worth, my home lab (back in the day, it's now powered off) the lab was really for spinning up numerous VMs which would have a short shelf life. The storage was incestuous. A single Centos VM running QuadStor serving local disk back into ESXi via iSCSI. As it has inline dedupe and compression with VAAI cloning of VMs from templates ran super well (cloning VMs within a few seconds on a single SSD) and then in guest sped was really limited by the SSD (given the iscsi ran a bus speeds).

Depending on your lab, it may be worth looking into. IIRC it took about 30 seconds to spin up a new VM from template of about 15 / 20 GB (sysprep taking about 5 minutes, but each machine had little resources).

ov_sjo · 29 Sep 2016 at 09:31

Isn't an M1015 a bit OTT for a simple RAID 1 mirror? I suppose it's supported by ESXi though.

Deleted member 138126 · 29 Sep 2016 at 12:24

SSD all the way. Get the cheapest one that will give you the space you need. Remember you should have all your VMs thin-provisioned, so they only take up the amount of space they are each using. A 7200 RPM SATA disk gives you maybe 100 IOPS, an SSD gives you 10s of thousands of IOPS. No comparison.

Ploppy2k3 · 29 Sep 2016 at 15:07

agree with the SSD. I use a few a handful of small SSD's up to 240gb in size and then have my Server 2012 R2 NAS running with iSCSI connections to normal HDD's for large data or when you are labing and need iSCSI

SSD's just rule for this type of application

Misan · 30 Sep 2016 at 19:42

Many thanks for the suggestions guys - Yeah, all my VM's are thin provisioned.

I ended up with a single 7200rpm drive due to my trusty two 750GB Samsung's failing on me last week (Lasted 6 years) - I just needed something to get things back up and running temporarily.

I think I'll just go with a couple of 850 Evo's - looks like they are pretty cheap now at 500GB.

RAID controller-wise, I'd prefer to grab myself a cheap M1015 just for future proofing over using the onboard SATA 2 ports.

ASE001 · 4 Oct 2016 at 10:06

Have you considered using a NAS to provide your DataStores. If you use a NAS with multiple NIC's you could provision a DataStore per NIC.

You could then either

have your VMs balanced across DataStores (50% on each)

or

OS disks could be on one DataStore and the Data disk on another.

Liquidfox · 11 Oct 2016 at 22:19

ASE001 said:
Have you considered using a NAS to provide your DataStores. If you use a NAS with multiple NIC's you could provision a DataStore per NIC.

You could then either

have your VMs balanced across DataStores (50% on each)
or

OS disks could be on one DataStore and the Data disk on another.

Unless the NAS has a hefty CPU you'll likely notice some huge performance issues

ESXi Datastore Considerations

Deleted member 138126

Deleted member 138126