NAS for Hyper-V?

J

Jaffa Cakes!

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 13, 2007
Messages
136
Hi Guys,

I'm looking at expanding storage in our network, a) for user profile storage and b) for VMs on our Hyper-V host. I have about £600 to spend.

Currently our Hyper-V host is separate from the physical DC/fileserver for user profiles. Our Hyper-V host is running 5 VMs (x2 Linux, x1 SCCM, x1 Forefront TMG and x1 virtual DC) but seems quite sluggish on internal storage at the moment, although usable. On top of this, we're running out of user storage pretty rapidly on the physical DC.

What would you guys do? Go for beefier internal storage or a NAS? I'm pretty flexible in terms of our setup. I was looking at QNAP or Synology boxes but people seem to have had performance issues with them in virtualised environments.
 
I ran a couple servers off of a Synology Diskstation (8-bay) for a while via iSCSI. No complaints. Needing nothing more than what's built into Synology DSM software and what's built into Windows Server 2008 R2. Performance seemed close to native/local. Only stopped because the Synology unit needed to be repurposed. My experience may not be representative though since our operation isn't all that big.

As I'm sure you know, disk i/o is usually the biggest issue in VM performance (or, at least, the one folks tend to run into first). You can only ask those hard drive heads to move so quickly when more than a couple VMs are asking it for data (or asking it to write data). I eventually just started creating RAID 1 mirrors with all the drives on my Hyper-V hosts and try to avoid putting more than one or two high-usage VMs on each mirror.

I've read that you can get away with more VMs on RAID 6 (etc.) but only if you have SSD-caching of the spindle disks. Going to try that on my next server build. Would sure be nice to use my storage capacity more efficiently.

--H
 
The real answer depends on your needs now and in the future. It seems like it would be cheaper and easier to install local storage, but eventually you will reach the limits of where that's practical.
 
what's your storage configuration at the moment?
because if your budget is £600 you can get a NAS with just gigabit ethernet and then you are limited to 125MB/s (theorically, pratically < 100MB/s) and this is worst of any (single) modern 1+TB 7200rpm hard drive..
 
Can you elaborate on the existing storage in you Hyper-V box now? You mentioned that it's sluggish, we won't know what to recommend until we know what mark we have to hit. :)
 
At the moment it's simply 4 7200rpm disks in two RAID1 arrays. On the first array I have the host OS, a Linux VM and a TMG server, on the second array I have a virtual DC, SCCM server and a Windows 8.1 testing virtual machine.

The problem is both TMG and SCCM use SQL databases for logging/reporting so (and although we're not a big shop) the 100+ish clients we have mean these get hit almost constantly for 5 days of the week.

Not an ideal setup by any means. The budget could probably stretch to £1000 on this if necessary.
 
Get off local storage sooner rather than later. Yes you can build a beefier server with more drives and keep using local storage but if you grow you will be right where you are now. It will also happen sooner than you think.
This way you can do a ton more in the future and decouple storage upgrades from server upgrades.
I am in the process of having to replace 3 hyper-v servers that all have local storage. The servers are all at their limits for disc, CPU and RAM, and they are 3,4, and 5 years old. The 4 year old one is having hardware issues and dropped 40 VMs in the middle of the day.
So now we have to buy a SAN, and new Hyper-V servers since the existing ones all need replaced or re-purposed. At this point I'll be using almost the entire year's budget to fix everything at once, instead of being able to spread stuff out over time.
 
with £1000 budget you can start thinking about dedicated storage over 10GBit, especially if you go for a "do-it-yourself" solution..
 
Look as a Synology Solution, but leave 2 bays open for SSD acceleration (2 SSDs required) when the budget allows. Even a £1000 might be borderline to fill it up, but a DS1813+ (767 @ Scan.co.uk) gives you 8 slots. Either migrate the existing disks or start with new disks. Once the Budget allows and you want a significant boost in performance, add in a pair of Intel 520/S3500 SSDs, turn on SSD Caching (Read or Read/Write) and watch the VM's fly.
 
Olga-SAN said:
+100500

qnap is a bit overpriced imho
Click to expand...

QNAP used to be ahead of Synology but has lagged behind in the last few years both in bundled features and storage features. i.e. Synology has MUCH a wider implementation of SSD caching, better flexibility and documented performance compared to the QNAP devices.
 
Nate7311 said:
QNAP used to be ahead of Synology but has lagged behind in the last few years both in bundled features and storage features. i.e. Synology has MUCH a wider implementation of SSD caching, better flexibility and documented performance compared to the QNAP devices.
Click to expand...

Now if they would just add SMB3 support. :)
 
The latest proliant microserver offers a massive incentive to go a different direction entirely...
 
The wd 1tb 10k rpm drives would be a great option to boost your performance especially over 7200 drives and sql dbs.
 
Olga-SAN said:
keeping in mind they are build on top of a free samba thing i guess they will quite soon

why do you need smb3 support for your backup appliance btw?
Click to expand...

Most of the models have at least 2 nics in them, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of smb3 multipathing for storage?
 
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