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NAS for Citrix Xen server and DR

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johnchor

New Around Here
hello guys,

I am looking for a cheap NAS capable of hosting 3 Citrix Xen server(VM) for HA implementation via iSCSI connections. I currently have a 2U 8bay Infotrend NAS EonCON 1310 12TB inherited. this NAS is build on SUN OS. it has deduplication features and save a lot storage space. but unfortunately it is super slow...RAM usage is always above 90%. I read up and this is due to SUN OS ZFS file system. this makes the Infotrend NAS unsuitable for VM HA implementation as the VM performance will be abysmal. I will still use it as a file share though...lolx.

I read up the NAS ranking charts here and always found QNAP to be near the TOP performance range.
I am looking for a cheap rack mount NAS and I am looking at QNAP TS-451U and also Synology RS815.
was wondering if QNAP TS-451U and also Synology RS815 with 4 SATA III disks in raid 5 mode 12TB can do the trick?

also I need to replicate the VMs backups from site A to B at night as a DR backup over the WAN. which is 1GB siteA and 100MB siteB(DR site) Fiber WAN link. so in short I need 2 NAS preferably of the same type.

can QNAP TS-451U and also Synology RS815 do the job?
what other options do I have for a cheap NAS?

Thanks
 
I tentatively advise that QNAP and Synology have their own VM capability in certain of their products. I wouldn't think that Citrix VM could drop-in to the custom Linux builds that these NASes use.

Those two vendors have their own High Availability solutions, so if HA is essential, you should look at these.

This is mid/high-end and rather pricey. I'd read up about each vendor's HA then talk by phone to their sales people.
 
Johnchor,

I've read nothing but trouble from the ZFS people about dedup. They reported exactly the problems you're experiencing - super high ram usage, and super slow performance. And dedup is like a virus -- once you turn it on, you cannot turn it off without a full wipe. Finally, as dedup grows, it requires more ram -- meaning that it could be possible to dedup yourself right out of a working box -- because you can no longer upgrade the ram to a large enough amount!

If you can live without dedup (Disk space is CHEAP!), than stevech's recommendations will work. Throw Drobo into the mix too, at least for their "enterprise" versions that support iscsi. I've got a drobo and some qnaps and they all support iscsi. (I prefer nfs myself though, at least for vmware).

Personally, I'd look at ixsystem's freenas servers. Relatively cheap, and you get to keep the other ZFS benefits (compression, instant snapshots, block level replication of snapshots, upgrading the size of the disks on a working raidz system without wiping). It uses openzfs for the filesystem, so you should feel right at home. Note that you can roll your own too -- openzfs is a freebsd based distro -- just make sure you use ECC ram in your system. :)
 
Hmmm... I'm not seeing a benefit to swapping out the Infortrend 1310 for a consumer/smb level NAS box, kind of a step backwards...

This seems to be more of a tuning/optimization opportunity with the current platform.

As SnakeByte indicated, dedupe is your primary problem, and to get away from it is a nuke/pave and start over, which is fine...

The 1310 is older, but it's a good platform, and their OS is as good as any out there - one might also consider SmartOS, which is another OpenSolaris variant, but well supported, and has the iSCSI and ZFS support built in.

BTW - RAID5, if you're looking for performance, it not the way to go, write performance will only be as fast as the slowest disk in the array, and it incurs extra overhead to calculate the striping/parity - there are much better options here - lot of it depends on what applications are in use, but I strong discourage RAID5 for most enterprise grade apps.

BTW2 - rather than going for a NAS, might consider going with a 2-socket 2U server instead...
 
hi guys

thanks for advice. I will turn off dedup on the infotrend 1310 nas. yeah its super slow.
I can't throw away the infotrend nas and buy something new. it has alot corporate data in there and also server backups using VEEAM and it is still under warranty. I am not ceo to say ok lets dump it...lolx

let me see if I can upgrade the RAM higher 2GB--> 8GB, to improve performance. the CPU usage is ok about only 5-10%.
and also see if I can upgrade the firmware to latest.

the question now is I wanted to have another NAS at another site as DR. HQ infotrend 1310 NAS will replicate all data to the DR site. should I stick to buy another new Infotrend NAS 1004 or Qnap/synlogy? I am just concern if different nas has different implemention and limitations...

thanks guys
 
hi guys

for another project to virtualize all servers. I plan to use 3 Citrix Xen Server(hypervisor) which allows to use Citrix Xen Center to have failover features like VMware Vcenter but Citrix it is FREE... lolx KVM(hypervisor) is also in consideration. but KVM seems to be a little primitive. later I will decide if using Xen or KVM. VMware and Hyper-v are all out due to high costs of the VCenter and SCVMM.

2 Citrix Xen servers will house 4 VMs each total 8 VMs. the 3rd Citrix Xen server will be a buffer in case one of the other has hardware issue. I can still have enough RAM capacity to auto failover to the 3rd Citrix Xen server without downtime.

I looked around again for cheap NAS. I checked out Asustor, Netgear, Seagate, Qnap, Synology.
it seems like most 1U NAS only has 2 nic port. only Qnap and Synology 1U NAS has 4 nic port
the reason to have 4 nic port is because I wanted the 3 citrix xen server to connect directly to the NAS using iSCSI
I don't have any budget to buy a iSCSI gigabit switch. and I do not like the idea to share iSCSI connection with LAN traffic thur our current 100MB switch...lolx... so I will have 1 nic port left for NAS management.

After checking most of the brands I come down to 2 NAS below:

1) QNAP TS-453U 24TB 4 x 6TB WD Red Drives, Quad-Core Intel Celeron 2.0GHz (up to 2.41GHz), 4GB DDR3L SDRAM (max 8GB), 4 1GbE LAN, Read 421MB/s, Write 420MB/s, Virtualization Station, Surveillance Station, VMware, Citrix
$2,057.00

2) Synology RS815+ 24TB 4 x 6TB Western Digital Red NAS drives, Intel Atom C2538 Quad Core 2.4 GHz, 2GB DDR3 (Expandable to 6GB), Synology Hybrid RAID, RAID 0/1/5/6/10 and JBOD, online RAID migration, VMware compatible.
$2,358.00

I am not sure if the above low range NAS can cope with running 8VMs? the 24TB disk space looks very good to me.
QNAP 8GB RAM looks good. and both also have 4 nic ports.

can anyone advice if such basic and cheapo design can work properly?
thanks and have a nice day.
 
Ask the vendors to discuss how many similar configs they've sold and for what (generally speaking) applications in terms of traffic loads.
 
Are you just running them as storage, or do you intend to run your VM's on the NAS box?

As "filers", they're pretty capable - but as for running nested VM's, you'll run out of compute resources pretty quick - from a QNAP perspective, moving up a class from the *53's to the *70 series might get you closer to where you might want to be - same would go with the Synology box, where the C2538 CPU will definitely be a bottleneck - it's old-school Atom, where at least on the TS453, while still "Atom", it's a more recent Intel architecture...

For both of your selections - they're certified for VMWare/Citrix as storage targets - e.g. they don't run the hypervisors directly on the box...
 
hi sir sfx2000,

Thanks for advice. Yes I am thinking of using the Qnap T-453U purely as a iSCSI storage to run my VMs. it will not be use for any other functions. I am doing for a charity group with very limited budget.

I was wondering if I upgrade the Qnap T-453U to max 8GB ram, configuring the 4 SATA disks as RAID-10 and also turning on jumbo frames on iSCSI connections will do the trick to improve performance. Ok I only have 5 MS Windows 2008R2 licenses. so it will only be 5 VMs on the Qnap NAS. the other 3 VMs will be Linux Centos servers which I will run on the 3 Citrix Xen hypervisors local hard disks. these Linux centos servers are non-critical servers so no failover is OK. 2 MS windows 2008R2 VMs will run MSSQL database and web applications. 2 will run as Active directory, DNS, DHCP and Print server. File sharing will still be on the Infotrend NAS as I do not think it is good to use VM as a file server due to the big VMDK files generated...

another thing is about VM backups. I really hate to backup across network. Can Qnap NAS native backup to a BIG usb drive attached directly to to NAS? I am concern if the VMs which has MSSQL will be corrupted? I am using Veeam backup now and Veeam will Quince the MSSQL so the database backup will be consistent.

I am hoping for a low cost, simple design with some failover.

thanks and have a nice day.
 
Well - most NAS vendors can directly dump to another target - can be another NAS, big USB disk directly attached, or whatever - whether rync or supported backup client/server app.

For the MSSQL - I wouldn't back up the VMDK file, but rather run the job within the SQL environment, as it can run the scheduled SQL maintenance without locking/shutting down the DB - and take the resulting DB backup to another target - same with go with the other VM's - back up the app data perhaps as needed, but one doesn't have to back up the whole big VMDK file...
 
How well the storage devices will work for your VM's depends highly on what kind of usage patterns the VM's have. Since you are talking about using just iscsi then the usage of interest is mainly IO.

Back in the day in an old company we got a Netapp cluster with one shelf of fast disk for databases and another shelf of Sata disks for other use. Even though it was sold like this it quickly came aparent that there is quite a limit to how much IO the sata disks could handle and it became a big problem. You are talking about VM's and 6TB disks, to me this sounds like a recipe for disaster because you can fit so much on the disks and they will still have very limited IO. If your VM's are not disk intensive and that is the main use for the NAS it should work ok, but don't expect miracles.
 
Something was bothering about this thread, and Kamina's comment it what it was...

OP wants to run the DB's on VMDK's on the iSCSI - which is a big no-no... with DB access, one can make many, many small changes to a big file (the v-disk), and at the same time, many read/query requests, again, to that same big VMDK file - it gets IO limited extremely fast, and it's a good way to blow up the entire thing...

Run the DB files on the metal... and again, for backups, use the SQL maintenance scripts and you can direct that snapshot to an outside storage target. Don't try to back up the entire database while it's in production, as it basically just won't be what you need if one wants to restore..
 
What bothers me is that he's serving the needs of a non-profit.
I'd be worried that this system he discusses is too elaborate, costly, for them to sustain in the long term. And might lead to recurring costs for NAS admin. Unless someone reliable provides that gratis.
 
What bothers me is that he's serving the needs of a non-profit.
I'd be worried that this system he discusses is too elaborate, costly, for them to sustain in the long term. And might lead to recurring costs for NAS admin. Unless someone reliable provides that gratis.

Good point - but also consider that Non-Profits do have employees... which OP may be - I'm not making assumptions here.

But the KISS approach for something that is sustainable is a big incentive to do it the 'right way'...
 
My neighbor works for BlackBaud - manages development of CRM software to non-profits. He tells stories about his customers getting way over their head in IT.
 
My neighbor works for BlackBaud - manages development of CRM software to non-profits. He tells stories about his customers getting way over their head in IT.

Sounds like he's the guy they call when things go wrong...
 
Something was bothering about this thread, and Kamina's comment it what it was...

OP wants to run the DB's on VMDK's on the iSCSI - which is a big no-no... with DB access, one can make many, many small changes to a big file (the v-disk), and at the same time, many read/query requests, again, to that same big VMDK file - it gets IO limited extremely fast, and it's a good way to blow up the entire thing...

Run the DB files on the metal... and again, for backups, use the SQL maintenance scripts and you can direct that snapshot to an outside storage target. Don't try to back up the entire database while it's in production, as it basically just won't be what you need if one wants to restore..

We've run DB's on virtual machines using 3par or EVA storage devices, though recently they are all migrated to Fusion-IO storage. In this case the key to success is really fast disk combined with allocating so much memory that it only really needs to do writes to disk. That can require quite a lot of optimization by the DBA to really work (and we are talking of storage with a lot of fast disk attached with fiber).

Basically a nas can work surprisingly well as a file server where users are streaming large consecutive files. When you suddenly add something with small random IO like virtual machines, databases, email server storage etc then things will degrade so fast you won't know what hit you. One exception here is SSD cache which could make a big difference, however you would really need to do a case study on what your intended implementation is and how much it could help. The vendors have quite a little data available, reviews don't cover the feature in a meaningful way etc. From what I picked up I understood Synology's caching might be intended towards block usage such as iscsi shares, Qnap maybe more on file sharing but this difference could be quite crucial.
 

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