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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?

Mark Henderson
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user3147180
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  • I'd stick with local disks until you can't anymore. The drop in sequential and random read/write performance going to a consumer NAS is no joke. – ewwhite May 07 '14 at 06:19
  • [Search](http://serverfault.com/search?q=vsphere+nas) and the answer will be revealed already. – user9517 May 07 '14 at 06:25

1 Answers1

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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.

Mark Henderson
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  • Thanks mark, It is my Home lab not production environment. Is there any other way to attahc that NAS to IBM server to make speed boost like usb3.0 or esata or any other option or add PCI card to IBM server. My problem is that sas drive has very less disk space – user3147180 May 07 '14 at 06:18