Vmware Storage Help

hellarda

hellarda

hellarda

Soldato
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Afternoon,

Some background:

Have two systems both running ESXi one of them has a WHS 2011 VM on it, and the other has a FreeNas VM on it.

The system that has WHS 2011 installed has 2x 300GB SAS disks which I use for VM storage. The FreeNas system has 1x 500GB 2x 2TB and 1x1TB disks in it.

What I want to do:

Dedicate the 2x 2TB and 1x 1TB disks to FreeNas and setup a ZFS array, and then add this as an ISCSI Target and connect the WHS 2011 VM to it.

However I'm not sure what the best way to set this up is.

Do I have the WHS 2011 VM connecting directly to the FreeNas VM via ISCSI? or do I connect the ISCSI Target to the ESXi system with WHS 2011 on it and add it as a datastore to the WHS 2011 VM?

Also how do I dedicate the 2x 2TB and 1x 1TB disks to FreeNas?

Apologies for the noobiness, and I'm aware that this is probably a terribly messy/bad way to do it but I'm trying to learn so any help/advice will be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks

Ali
 
I would add the drives as datastores to the freenas box, create the array in freenas and then connect iscsi from whs to freenas.

I'm not 100% sure on how to map the drives in freenas, but could do it through RDM i think. Which version of esxi are you running?
 
Cheers for that.

Though I have decided to do it a slightly different way to try and have a shared datastore so i can boot the VMs on any Host.

At the moment I have a seperate system which is running windows Server 2008 R2 and using that as an NFS server and connect all the hosts to that and created a datastore cluster.

One more question

I'm seeing fairly slow performance with NFS (not my network as I have 4gbps teams between the servers), would iSCSI be faster? Though can you still use iSCSI as a shared datastore?

cheers

EDIT:

Running esxi 5.0.0 U1
 
the seperate system running the nfs system what are the specs? I'd be looking in performance monitor at things like disk i/o, network bandwidth, cpu usage, avg write queue and avg read queue. Might give some more ideas on why there's slow transfers going on.

I've not used iscsi for years, in fact when it was only just starting to take off, and couldn't get it working properly, and haven't really used nfs for storage.

Are the drives sata? If so that could be your prob, as sata doesn't have high iops which are really needed for virtualization. If both hosts are trying to read and write data to them they might be having to wait for each other.
 
Thanks,

Specs are:

AMD Athlon II x4 645 3.0GHz
4GB RAM

The drives I'm accessing are 2x1TB SATA in Raid 0 and a single 3tb SATA.

The performance does seem to have picked up to an acceptable level. (much faster than it was before so not quite sure what it was.)

Sounds like it could be the SATA drives then. But can't reallly afford large SAS/SSD so itll have to do.

Sorry while youre here: I'm now having a problem formatting a disk I have added to one of my VM's. Its on the same NFS server but a different drive. The Drive is 2x 1TB and I have created a virtual disk of 1.2TB. I have initialized it under windows and it is now formatting, but its been formatting for the past 2 hours :confused:

Its performing a quick format. Although I can't see any network activity between the host and the NFS server so I'm not sure its actually doing anything at all...

any ideas again? Thanks
 
I can't help you with the formatting issue, but I've had similar issues formatting a drive in vmware, took hours and hours, I just left it, and it sorted itself out.

Hope you get it sorted.
 
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