Suggestions for a NAS for VMware storage

Question

I have been looking at Openfiler, and it appears to be a great open-source solution. I haven't seen very much documentation on limitations of OF. We are by no means a Fortune 500 company (yet:) so our current budget is rather minimal, but none the less I would like to hear your opinions!

Our storage server consists of 6TB (12 x 500GB), AMD 2.4 (2x), 8GB RAM and the purpose will be to serve as our VMWare storage. The VMs will consist of web servers, QB servers, and possibly small-scale mail will be run off our blade environment.

Just wanted hear your thoughts since I don't have any experience other than with Dell's SAN management software.

Answer 1

My current recommendation is NexentaStor, available in a free community-supported edition and as a commercial offering.

Also see:

Anybody have experience with using Nexenta?

NexentaStor CE or Openfiler? Which do you recommend?

Answer 2

FreeBSD 8.2, running ZFS. ZFS includes the following out of the box:

• Supports NFS & iSCSI out of the box.
• ZFS includes Snapshots, data checksums, multiple copies, filesystem compression
• RAID-Z - Similar to RAID-5, but without the RAID-5 write hole. All disk writes are atomic copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is never inconsistent (No need to FSCK after a power outage!).
• Double-parity RAID-Z2 (e.g. RAID-6, but without the write hole)
• (soon) data deduplication
• There is no need for an expensive RAID controller, so you can drop that layer of complexity.

Read more about the benefits of ZFS in this short summary at http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/whatis .

FreeBSD is a very solid operating system, and ZFS is surprisingly easy to learn and use.

This solution is free. There's no cost. There are a couple additional packaged products which are similar:

• http://www.ixsystems.com/storage/ix/home-office-storage/freenas-mini.html (If you need support). Ixsystems is involved with FreeBSD/FreeNAS development, which is a plus.
• http://www.freenas.org/ - A storage product based off of FreeBSD 8. FreeBSD is general purpose, but FreeNAS is geared towards being a storage appliance.
• http://www.nexenta.org/ - This is the Illumos/OpenIndiana/OpenSolaris core with a Linux userland system. I've heard many good things about this, but the hybrid OS is a little strange to me. Nexenta is involved with core Illumos/OpenIndiana development, which is a plus.