Cheap nas for Esxi home lab

SteveFer

Hi Guys,

I'm wondering could someone recommend a decent but more importantly cheap NAS device for network storage for an ESXI home lab, I'm running nested VMs with internal storage from the first host shared out via Freenas and I'm having lots of connection problems so I'm hoping a real shared storage device would solve this.

Thanks

emerald_octane

most anything from QNAP with multiple nics and iSCSI will give you iSCSI multi path (depending on how complicated you want to get). very very stupid easy to install, if you get something off the vmware HCL you can easily call qnap for config install. I run the a ts series. If you want to go cheaper you can use NFS.

QNAP TS-231+-US Diskless System Powerful yet affordable 2-bay NAS for SMBs - Newegg.com

SteveFer

Thanks, I dont see this on the HCL, you run this in a vmware lab ?

iBrokeIT

I have a QNAP 853 and a 469, they work great for iSCSI and NFS

kj0

Forget HCL for Labs. (For network storage) If you're using iSCSI it doesn't matter - Just no VMware support. (Definitely use HCL if using outside LAB)

The Synology DS414Slim with SSDs is a great option. by two SSDs now for performance and then add two more down the track. You'd need more drives if using regular disks. Nice and compact, quiet and uses next to no power.

The unit itself is quite cheap compared to others.

Deathmage

I have a QNAP TS-420 and it works great in a RAID 5 with (4) 2 TB 7.2K drives for the ESXi cluster; for a home-lab is plenty. Can vouch for it's handling of VMware.

jibbajabba

I got two Synology DS414-Slim .. They do the job nicely and also got multiple nics

One got 4x480GB SSDs and the other 4x1TB SSDH .. never had any connectivity or performance issues (assuming you wipe the default file based ISCSI volume and change it to block storage).

SteveFer

jibbajabba wrote: »

I got two Synology DS414-Slim .. They do the job nicely and also got multiple nics

One got 4x480GB SSDs and the other 4x1TB SSDH .. never had any connectivity or performance issues (assuming you wipe the default file based ISCSI volume and change it to block storage).

Thanks, I went for the ts-231 for the time being , when you say wipe the default volume, do you recommend using something like Freenas to replace it , or what would be the best to use ?

jibbajabba

SteveFer wrote: »

Thanks, I went for the ts-231 for the time being , when you say wipe the default volume, do you recommend using something like Freenas to replace it , or what would be the best to use ?

I can't talk about QNAP as I never had one, but oh no, I mean delete it from within the Synology interface. Synology allows all kinds of stuff. So for starters, a volume, which is created by default, is like a big LUN with some random file system and shares on it. These shares then can be used to create NFS shares, CIFS shares and so on.

Another option is to create an ISCSI LUN - so you'd use the Synology app for storage to delete the volume and add it dedicated to ISCSI as block device, rather than file.

You wouldn't be able to use the ISCSI LUN for anything else though - in fact - you wouldn't even be able to install any apps, unless you got some file based lun as well ... That is why I got two .. one dedicated to iSCSI - and one as a file storage ..

zcarenow

jibbajabba wrote: »

I got two Synology DS414-Slim .. They do the job nicely and also got multiple nics

One got 4x480GB SSDs and the other 4x1TB SSDH .. never had any connectivity or performance issues (assuming you wipe the default file based ISCSI volume and change it to block storage).

How much was it?

jibbajabba

How much was what ? The Synology or SSDs ?

I honestly can't remember.

* googles *
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Right, Synology is on ebuyer.com £212, the 480GB SSD £111 and the 1TB SSDH £68 ($1 = £0.6
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