[Cialug] Virtual Box and NAS

[David Champion]

You would expect that, but some real-world testing of the cheap NAS boxes
shows differently. They use really low-end Marvell imbedded chipsets.

You can buy a Dell T110 for about the same price as a soho NAS, sometimes
cheaper. It has a "real" processor, a good Intel gigabit NIC, and can hold 4
SATA drives, and has an ESATA port. Put your favorite NAS type OS on it or
even just a generic Linux distro, and it's going to beat the pants off a
Netgear or Dlink NAS, and probably be more stable.

Google for NAS benchmarks, there are several out there.

-dc

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Dave Hala Jr <dave at 58ghz.net> wrote:
>
>> I really doesn't appear that there is much differance between the
>> Readynas 1500 and the entry level Powervaults.
>>
>> My intent is virtualize about 6 servers and most likely launch the VM's
>> from a central location. They are mostly low-medium traffic webservers.
>>
>> I'm not against building a server, but ya know, if I can just buy one
>> and plug it in, that's not always a bad thing.  I was hoping to stay
>> around the 1500-3k range. How many people actually build there own rack
>> servers anymore?
>>
>>
> I totally agree. I would expect that a GigE connection to a RAID array
> (with presumably fast seek times) should be able to approach an IDE drive's
> performance. I don't know much about these NAS's you're mentioning but I've
> seen a low cost consumer device that can NOT saturate the GigE port and seem
> to be bandwidth limited by internal architecture. (<$200 units)
>
> According to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Comparison_to_other_interfaces it
> suggests that IDE bandwidth just slightly exceeds 1Gb/s. Considering TCP/IP
> overhead that means you should probably expect slow-ide like performance at
> best. Probably not a great plan if your VMs need much i/o bandwidth. Fibre
> channel looks like a better choice if you can get it.
>
> I'll show my inexperience with this question: Is GigE 1Gb/s each way (total
> 2Gb/s) assuming you have a full duplex connection? If so then maybe IDE-like
> performance isn't unreasonable to expect.
>
> --
> Matthew Nuzum
> newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter
>
> ♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫
>
>
>
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