What is a good NAS OS for ESXi/vSphere?

[tech3475]

I recently got myself a microserver (HP G1610t with 10GB RAM) and I've installed ESXi/vSphere 5.5 onto it and currently have W7 (4GB RAM) and Server 2012 R2 (2GB RAM) running on it with ok performance.

I want to also use this server as a NAS and I would like it to be independent of the other OSs so I'm thinking about running another VM purely for storage with maybe 1-2GB of RAM for it.

FreeNas concerns me because ZFS apparently should have allot of RAM (which I can't spare right now), but I've only seen a few people with personal benchmarks actually try it.

Is Nas4free any good as an alternative? I was also thinking about maybe formatting it to NTFS (so I can also use the vmdk in windows directly if needed) unless the performance drop is significant.

Other solutions are welcome.

Thank you.

 

[Alabalcho]

Unless you can assign a physical spindle (disks) to a VM, I see no practical reason to install NAS in a VM.

 

[tech3475]

Yes can try with that also have a look at this FreeNAS which is also good.

But will FreeNAS be ok with 1-2GB of RAM, I heard ZFS uses RAM allot for caching with recommendations going as high as 8GB+.

Unless you can assign a physical spindle (disks) to a VM, I see no practical reason to install NAS in a VM.

Any viable alternatives? AFAIK ESXi requires some sought of OS to create a NAS.

 

[Alabalcho]

Never used FreeNAS, cannot tell how much memory allocation affects the performance (yes, I also have read the ZFS rule "1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage"), and some articles even recommend min of 6GB for practical usage. YMWV...

Searching for "ESXi assign physical disk" shows that at lest vmWare Workstation supports that, so I suppose ESXi supports it as well.

 

[tech3475]

Never used FreeNAS, cannot tell how much memory allocation affects the performance (yes, I also have read the ZFS rule "1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage"), and some articles even recommend min of 6GB for practical usage. YMWV...

Searching for "ESXi assign physical disk" shows that at lest vmWare Workstation supports that, so I suppose ESXi supports it as well.

From what I've read, while possible it isn't recommended to use raw disks. Apparently there are also only minimal benefits over using virtual disks.