Storage set-up

[cheechm]

Not sure if I'm doing this the right way, as there might be a better way. However this is what I have:

Dell Poweredge 1950 (2x dual core Xeon and 8gb RAM) - running vMware ESXi
QNAP TS-410U (w/ 3tb of disk space)

So at the moment, I uses the QNAP as an iSCSI disk, which VM connects to. On this is a whole datastore which one of my virtual machines running Freenas is connected.

Is there a better way I should look at setting this up? Haven't managed to do any speed tests as of yet, but will try to at some point.

Cheers

 

[BillHicksRIP]

Am about to pull the trigger on a 410 myself. I've got a single server attached to my home network using the broadband router. I've been told to get an additional NIC and link that to the 410 using a gigabit switch and leave the other card for the VM's to talk over. I thought the QNAP software allows you to set up iSCSI targets itself? I've played around with FreeNAS, and I do like it, but I was going to buy the QNAP as I wouldn't have to worry about keeping a VM running just for storage. I was intending to run an NFS server using the QNAP software and allocate some iSCSI targets for particular projects (Windows clusters). The main reason for the purchase is getting a RAID5 solution as my ESXi host is currently unbacked up!