up vote 2 down vote favorite
2
share [g+] share [fb]

I am looking for recommendations on the best software to use to build an iscsi nas for use with esxi in a development environment. Free NAS and openfiler seem to be way to slow. Win 2008 and starwind provided moderate performance at 45 MB/s throughput. Nimbus's MySan was slower at 33 MB/s Ideally I would like to reach about 100MB/s. Not sure if dual gigabit nic's will be needed to reach this speed. Has anyone tried linux with mdadm?

link|improve this question
57% accept rate
I think your trouble with StarWind performance is in settings. I had no problem with it. Try to ask their support. – ToreTrygg Jan 14 '10 at 10:11
feedback

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 11 '10 at 15:58

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

HP's (fairly-recently acquired) Lefthand 'Virtual SAN Appliance' software is damn quick.

link|improve this answer
1  
Agree. But it is also damn expencive ;) – ToreTrygg Jan 14 '10 at 10:10
Sorry, my company gets seriously good discount from HP so my understanding of 'regular' pricing is quite poor. – Chopper3 Jan 14 '10 at 10:54
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

Something's wrong with your disk setup. I've seen a throughput of 700-900MB/s on a 10GBit/s network. The performance was quite the same with OpenFiler. Just roll with OpenFiler with a LACP'd dual or quad channel ethernet link, a 10+ spindle RAID 10 on entry SAS drives - it will be fast esp. when compared to the numbers you provided.

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

Build your own, use OpenFiler(http://www.openfiler.com/).

link|improve this answer
"Free NAS and openfiler seem to be way to slow" - he has already tried this. Although there is probably something wrong with his setup, he has already done this. – Mark Henderson♦ Jan 11 '10 at 21:45
1  
It's all about configuration of openfiler and your network setup/configuration. I have a home grown openfiler san running in my orginization that are actually setup for ha and using drbd to cluster between them. With a properly configured network we get well over 100 mb/s – Shadow00Caster Jan 11 '10 at 22:39
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

You should re-configure your StarWind. Make sure Windows has TCP doing wire speed. Then configure MPIO. With 1 GbE connection you should do reads/writes at ~110-115MB/sec and MPIO would multiply your bandwidth. Try posting question and logs on StarWind forum. Guys from there are very helpful. Nimbus was dropped long time ago and Openfiler is on slow side (being SCSI-3 incompatible at the same time so no Hyper-V and having issues with VMware, read this:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1026596

Good luck!

TLO

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.