[Cialug] Virtual Box and NAS

[Dave Hala Jr]

Maybe the way to do this would be to pick up a refurb'ed rack mount
server with raid and hot swappable drives and just put new drives in it.
An older dual xeon server with a gb nic and a 1-2gb of ram has a lot of
horsepower.


On Fri, 2011-08-12 at 15:20 -0500, David Champion wrote:
> 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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