I’ve been running a vSphere lab of my since ESX 2.x. Over the years, I’ve used both local and NAS based storage with varying degrees of satisfaction with the results. In the case of NAS storage, which is required since I can’t afford a SAN, I looked at Synology devices over the last year trying to gain the motivation to make the investment.
Needless to say, I dove in with both feet, and maxed out a Synology DS1511+ with 3TB drives. I purchased my Synology DS1511+ from SimplyNas with the drives included, including their burn-in testing, and I haven’t looked back. The device has been up and running since October 2011.
I’ve been using a few Iomega StorCenter IX4-200D’s as storage targets for vSphere 4 ESXi and have been a little disappointed at the performance. This disappointment really only comes when VMs are booting, I’m using Storage VMotion, or consolidating snapshots. For the price point, it’s still a great piece of equipment and I can honestly say that I’ve had 17+ active VMs running off the unit with no problem once the VMs are up and running. Keep in mind this is a lab implementation and those VMs weren’t under heavy utilization.
I’ll keep this post updated with anything else I come up with or that is submitted in comments.
Edited 10/23/2011 – No longer recommending use of NFS as a vSphere target on this unit.
I’ve been using an Iomega IX4-200D as a storage target for vSphere and have to say that for the most part it works well. I’ve used it both as an iSCSI target and as NFS storage.
You can and should expect it to suffer typical storage performance issues. It runs on 4 hard drives, mine in a RAID 5 array which is not the most performant, but best in case of disk failure and who wants to lose VMs. It’s still a limited set of spindles to work with and keeping that in mind will save you troubles down the road.
At one point, I had 17 VMs running on a single IX4-200D.
I’ve been running a vSphere lab of my since ESX 2.x. Over the years, I’ve used both local and NAS based storage with varying degrees of satisfaction with the results. In the case of NAS storage, which is required since I can’t afford a SAN, I looked at Synology devices over the last year trying to gain the motivation to make the investment.
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