Is it possible to use EX4 in conjunction with VMware to add as a new datastore over NFS? I specified the IP as the address but it asks for the folder and the datastore name, not sure what should be specified in that field and whether that will work.
As far as I know, NFS has been disabled on the EX4 for the last couple firmware versions…so if your firmware is up to date, you won’t be able to use NFS itself.
NFS no, but iSCSI Should work.
Which VMWare do you mean? I setup an iSCSI partition on my EX4 and got to it work with one or two of the baremetal VMWare products (ESXi and/or vSphere Hypervisor). Formatted to vmfs5 ok. I was able to Storage vMotion running machines on to and off from it.
Hi itsne
I did connect the EX4 with vSphere 5.5 as a iSCSI device. It works but the Performance is very poor!
I am using 4 x 2Tb wd disks, but I think for vsphere is only SSD useful. I am wondering about the Performance of the EX4 device with 4 x SSD drives in a raid5. Maybe there is one who has tryed this???
regards Novell1.
How many nic’s in your ESXi hosts? How many hosts in your data center? Are they all trying to access the EX4 at the same time? The EX4 supports link aggregation. I’ve not tried it yet but if your switches support it, you might find a bit more performance there.
You might get better performance from using a pair of mirrors. The EX4 implements RAID in software. RAID 1 (mirror) doesn’t require much CPU - it just writes the same data to both disks. RAID 5 on the other hand, has to calcuate the checksums for the parity disk. That’s all maths for the CPU to do. The CPU in the EX4 isn’t real fast. So If you don’t need the disk space, use two RAID 1’s.
But.
If you’re considering SSD’s then you have money… Personally, I really don’t think the disks are the problem. If you have the money, buy a better NAS! I did that at work the performance difference is staggering.
It seems like you’re ready to throw good money after bad trying to fit a lower end consumer grade device to something that really does require a bit of grunt.
