NAS Help

[OwenAdams]

Hello everyone, this is my first time using the LTT Forum so hopefully, I get everything right. I currently have a Dell R710 running ESXi and a couple virtual machines including a VM of Windows Server 2016. My question for everyone is this should I deal with using Windows File Share in the Windows server VM for use on my local network or buy another dedicated server for uses as a physical NAS instead of the virtual one? Also, I already have 4 three TB Seagate SAS drives I could populate another server with. I'm looking for something reliable, fast and fairly straightforward to set up.

[samcool55]

If you just have 1 ESXi, you don't need a dedicated SAN/NAS. If you have multiple ESXi's a centralized storage location would be recommended but for now, not really.

 

However that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. If you want to just mess with some stuff and try something out, you can always get one, something like freenas should do the job

[OwenAdams]

I have the ESXi server for testing and messing around with, so I am skeptical about storing data on it in case I mess something up on the ESXi server. So would another ESXi server be better than a FreeNAS, or something similar, server? @samcool55

[samcool55]

Just now, OwenAdams said:

I have the ESXi server for testing and messing around with, so I am skeptical about storing data on it in case I mess something up on the ESXi server. So would another ESXi server be better than a FreeNAS, or something similar, server? @samcool55

You can always run ESXi on the secondary sever and run freenas virtually. Just give the drives to the freenas VM and you should be good to go. As long as you backup the freenas VM often it shouldn't be too bad if you screw up the ESXi, you can always reinstall ESXi and restore the freenas VM

 

Also such setup allows you to run vCenter and mess with that too It's a nice thing for managing multiple ESXi servers but is quite heavy to run for what it is.

[OwenAdams]

Okay sweet, I'm new to virtualization and ESXi so I'm trying to learn a lot. This stuff is really interesting to me.