So I am starting to poke around and sort out how I want to rebuild my test lab setup as I have been ramping back up on using it and finding it is a little anemic occasionally. Currently I am running off of SuperFastVirtualMofo which is an Intel Quad box I built back in the spring (I think?) of 2007 with 8GB of RAM and upgraded over time to some 5-6TB or so of online storage capability. The primary use of the server is to host virtual machines for my testing of different environments.
My thought for the next generation is to build using a hot swap[1] iSCSI SAN box (+eSata just in case I am not thrilled with perf) instead of putting a bunch of disk into the server(s). Then I can have one or more smaller servers packed with RAM and a medium sized SSD for boot/system that plug into the SAN.
Initial thoughts have me thinking about the QNAP Product suite as I keep hearing good things about them, specifically I have been thinking something like the TS-469L/Pro or perhaps the TS-669L/Pro.
Oh I currently expect to be building the new server(s) with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. The old server I would likely use for backups.
Thoughts from the blog readers?
thanks, joe
[1] Having replaced two failed drives in the current server over the last 5 or so years without having any indicator lights or anything else as to which drive is bad was painful and I would rather avoid in the future. Plus doing it while the equipment is running is a bonus.
I’ve been using hyper-v in 2012 and storage spaces with SATA drives. (Mixed II & III) It’s been fantastic. “Storage spaces” arrays even survive the multiple rebuild I go through. You just reattach them and go.
If you want to go with local RAID, the IBM M1015 controller is a very economical RAID controller that can be found on eBay relatively cheap. It’s 6 Gb/s, supports RAID-10 and you’ll find that it can also be flashed with alternative LSI firmware that changes it’s capabilities. Also, you can monitor drive status which was important to me.
I have a fairly extensive lab environment that I just migrated from ESXi to Hyper-V 2012 and in doing so, took the time to do some performance testing on the storage. In the end, I ended up with a RAID-10 of four 128 GB SSD drives and then a couple RAID-10 arrays of 1 TB and 2 TB drives. I use the SSD for more IOPS dependent and the rest goes on the capacity arrays. I tried the “Storage Spaces” option in Server 2012 and found the performance to be horrible. Contact me if you want any of the results from my tests.
My hosts are Intel S5520HC boards with the Xeon E5520 processors and lots of RAM; that side of it is a few years old now though and I’m sure there’s better options.
Thanks. I actually have a really nice Adaptec RAID card in the current box. I really want to detach the storage from the server. I have started looking at FreeNAS too which would allow me to set up the current server as a NAS device iSCSI target with current hardware and buy small systems with faster CPUs/MOBOs/RAM and connect to the current storage. Though the QNAP TS-469 is really calling to me.
I tried the iSCSI route with FreeNAS and a couple others and ran into so many issues with compatibility and then not being a Linux guy, I figured it would be hell if I had to troubleshoot. Some of those options look enticing with dedup and such but it proved to be too much effort for me. Good luck.