Best NAS for VMWare

[tgwill]

I'm searching for a NAS to go alongside a branch office VMWare View project. Since it'll be hosting desktops, I'll need something good that can keep up, but at the same time, it needs to be cost effective.

I have a small lab setup in my office with a two host cluster running 10 desktops, and 3 servers. Each host has three LAN connections in a LACP trunk to the switch, for storage, all I have right now is a POS Iomega Storcenter ix4-200d (4TB). The NAS is also on the same switch with LACP.

As of right now, using the NAS is awful. Performance is horrible, as one would expect with a sub $1000 NAS (especially after looking at the benchmarks here).
The NAS is setup with two NFS Datastores with Raid 0+1. With all guest VM's running, even at idle, doing simple stuff is slow.

I've been looking around, but I was hoping to get some real-world advice from someone who has tried to do something similar.

I've been checking out the QNAP TS559Pro+ as well as the Synology DS1511+. Anyone familiar with the Netgears?

 

[Generic George]

I'm searching for a NAS to go alongside a branch office VMWare View project. Since it'll be hosting desktops, I'll need something good that can keep up, but at the same time, it needs to be cost effective.

I have a small lab setup in my office with a two host cluster running 10 desktops, and 3 servers. Each host has three LAN connections in a LACP trunk to the switch, for storage, all I have right now is a POS Iomega Storcenter ix4-200d (4TB). The NAS is also on the same switch with LACP.

As of right now, using the NAS is awful. Performance is horrible, as one would expect with a sub $1000 NAS (especially after looking at the benchmarks here).
The NAS is setup with two NFS Datastores with Raid 0+1. With all guest VM's running, even at idle, doing simple stuff is slow.

I've been looking around, but I was hoping to get some real-world advice from someone who has tried to do something similar.

I've been checking out the QNAP TS559Pro+ as well as the Synology DS1511+. Anyone familiar with the Netgears?

I am not an expert on such things, but I believe you will want to focus on the iSCSI performance of the NAS, since iSCSI is designed with providing "virtual disks", like you would want with a VM.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/bar/13-iscsi-write
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/bar/11-iscsi-read

The DS1511+ should perform similarly to the DS411, but will better be able to handle heavier demands from multiple machines with the dual ethernet.

None of the current machines in this class will perform significantly better than the others. They all do very well now days. So it's mostly a question of reliability (I don't think any of the big players are bad on this point and I'd worry more about the HDs), some of the secondary features (like esata vs usb3 vs usb2 for backups/expansion) and how much you like the UI for the NAS.

Over all I guess I would go with the DS1511+. Synology generally seems to be considered to have the best UI currently, but again none of them are awful. It does have the very nice ability to expand with the external 5 bay addon boxes, though they have to be separate volumes and do have somewhat lower performance. None of the other competitors have a similar ability, though some do offer USB3 ports which at least conceivably could offer similar performance/expandability.

There aren't any compellingly unique abilities in the competition at least that I am aware of. But I don't think you can go horribly wrong with any of the current gen boxes in this price/feature range. Basically they are all very good and should do what you need.

You do want to avoid older boxes. I've seen some older 4-5 bay NAS that have transfer rates down in the 10-20 mb/sec range. Which is pretty much the ballpark your Iomega is in.

All the major vendors have a "trial" for their UIs on their websites.