Vmware Storage Help

hellarda · 21 Jul 2012 at 15:42

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

hellarda · 22 Jul 2012 at 01:17

anyone?

hellarda · 26 Jul 2012 at 10:17

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

hellarda · 27 Jul 2012 at 00:45

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