I have an IBM server x3850 M2. It has SAS drives that are too small for all of my Virtual Machines.
I also have an entry level Netgear ReadyNAS unit.
Can I use this as a datastore, and what kind of performance issues will I have?
I have an IBM server x3850 M2. It has SAS drives that are too small for all of my Virtual Machines.
I also have an entry level Netgear ReadyNAS unit.
Can I use this as a datastore, and what kind of performance issues will I have?
Running ESXi virtual machines off a consumer level NAS sucks hard.
I've done it with base level QNAPs with both iSCSI and NFS in a lab just to try it out. I got around 20-30MB/sec from NFS and about 15-25MB/sec from iSCSI. (These were the atom-based NASes - the higher level rack-mounted QNAPs with i3 processors do not have this problem)
Compare those stats to 200MB/sec you can get from a proper SAN with two 1GbE connections, or 300MB/sec from a set of local disks.
It might be OK for a small lab, or for testing and learning, but your performance is going to be rubbish.