Re:Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide
by reincarnate0x14 on Thursday August 27, 2020 @02:11PM
(#24296673)
Probably highly dependent on what you're doing with it and whether or not your SMB implementation supports the direct RDMA extensions.
In my case its mostly because I tend to run VMs on various older semi-retired machines with limited or slow local storage that I only turn on when I need them, and VMware's VMFS is cluster-aware, so it really doesn't matter which hypervisor is the one I end up spinning it up on.
I haven't dealt with Unraid specifically but there are a lot of caching and network parameters that can wildly affect performance -- VMware for example wants to do synchronous writes on network storage for obvious reasons, and having a safe write-cache and large transfers with enough in-flight commands can make a night and day difference.
If you're primarily just using NFS/SMB as file shares then getting iSCSI working probably isn't going to be a good use of your time versus figuring out why the existing setup behaves that way -- Samba and SMB performance tuning can be a frustrating experience but iSCSI is far more opaque and inscrutable on Windows particularly.
In my case its mostly because I tend to run VMs on various older semi-retired machines with limited or slow local storage that I only turn on when I need them, and VMware's VMFS is cluster-aware, so it really doesn't matter which hypervisor is the one I end up spinning it up on.
I haven't dealt with Unraid specifically but there are a lot of caching and network parameters that can wildly affect performance -- VMware for example wants to do synchronous writes on network storage for obvious reasons, and having a safe write-cache and large transfers with enough in-flight commands can make a night and day difference.
If you're primarily just using NFS/SMB as file shares then getting iSCSI working probably isn't going to be a good use of your time versus figuring out why the existing setup behaves that way -- Samba and SMB performance tuning can be a frustrating experience but iSCSI is far more opaque and inscrutable on Windows particularly.