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I’m trying to design a storage system that will work for my company for the foreseeable future, but seeing as enterprise storage is not my strong suit, there are some decisions I’m not sure how best to make.

We are a relatively small company that is rapidly expanding, so our storage needs will grow over time. Right now we are storing only files, but that will be expanding to include a bunch of seldom-used VMs in the near future. Ultimately I expect around a 30/70 files/VMs ratio. Because of the way we expand, I may need to add several hundred gig of files all at once, or even a TB worth of VMs without much notice. Therefore, my vision includes basically a pile o’ storage that I can throw anything at, and is scalable and highly available. The VMs will include SQL databases, which I know are performance-sensitive, but again, they’ll be seldom used-- probably powered on once a month if that.

Right now I have three Synology NASes to work with, and basically as much compute power as I need. My plan is to use DFS for managing shares and replication, but I’m not sure how best to configure the NASes. I can either:

  1. Convert all storage to thin- or thick-provisioned iSCSI;

  2. Convert some of the storage to thin-provisioned iSCSI for VMs only, and leave the rest alone as a standard NAS;

  3. Leave it all as NAS, and relegate the VMs to internal storage. I can add more internal storage as needed, but installation will be more cumbersome since I’d have to physically travel to where the servers are located.

  4. ?

What would you do in this case? And as a bonus question: if I go the iSCSI route, how large should I make my LUNs, considering I don’t know exactly how storage requirements will increase over time? I’d hate to have a bunch of small thick-provisioned LUNs only to acquire a new VM that won’t fit in any of them.

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Hello Mate!

I faced that challenge during last 6 years facing similar accomplishments for two companies.

Personally I has been using HP 3PAR, HP EVA4400 and IBM StoreWize v5000

The 3 ones works great, no problems, the best in my own choice by performance and pricing surely is StoreWize v5000, small, compact, highly scalable and there are not hidden fees to enable needed features.

You asked:

  1. Convert all storage to thin- or thick-provisioned iSCSI; “YES, convert available storage to THIN is the best practice you can do”

  2. Convert some of the storage to thin-provisioned iSCSI for VMs only, and leave the rest alone as a standard NAS; NAS would be my further second backup for contingency on remote location and possible second recovery plan.

  3. Leave it all as NAS, and relegate the VMs to internal storage (This would not be smarter, you loose vmotion, backup and some other valued features of vCenter). I can add more internal storage as needed, but installation will be more cumbersome since I’d have to physically travel to where the servers are located (Absolutely).

iSCi is a good option, but the best one (when running multiple vms and file sharing) is FC, I would use and choice iSCi only if I can select an DELL EMC, but FC is the best in performance, it can handle + 40gbps per channel.

+40Gbps per channel

Dell

IBM

@HPE

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Thank you Carlos. Unfortunately one thing I can’t do is buy new hardware, so I’m fairly limited with what I have. The Synologies were not my choice, but it’s what I have to work with. They do not support FC, only iSCSI (or of course I can leave them as NASes). They are located in three separate cities, so I can replicate and backup between them.

If I understand correctly, you’d advise converting one of the NASes to an iSCSI SAN and using it for all production purposes (both files and VMs), and back up to the second/third NASes?

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How much space do you have on your local disks? See, while you can do DFS-R with inexpensive NASes it’s honesty not something you’d want to put into production.

Similar thread:

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I would not recommend using DFS-R for such purposes, there were a lot of similar topics here, let me provide one.

Regarding the Synology, you can take StarWind Virtual SAN and create Activ-Active replication between the storages. Here is a nice Synology NAS case.

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KOOLER, from what I’m seeing in that thread, I’m not really sure what the cost of the hardware has to do with whether or not it’s a good idea to use DFSR? Can you please clarify?

Local disks have almost no storage. Half our infrastructure is t2 AWS, which means ~30GB. We’ll be adding some onsite virtual infrastructure to run the VMs we’ll be acquiring, but I don’t expect that will have much local storage either. But on the NASes I have plenty of space-- we have 3x Synology RS816s with 4x 4TB drives each, in RAID 5, for a total of nearly 33 TB formatted capacity. Out of that we’re currently using maybe 200 GB for file storage, on just one of the units-- the other two are untouched until I can determine how best to implement a scalable HA storage solution.

Artem, I took a deeper look at your product, and it might actually fit our needs. From my understanding I can leave the NASes configured as NASes, and StarWind vSAN will consolidate that storage and prevent it to my DFS server as iSCSI storage broken up however I want; is that correct? I’ll have to do some testing but this may be the way to go.