Lab Update

A few small investments in the lab recently, I got rid of the Openfiler server a while back and replaced it with dedicated NAS boxes. I had purchased a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ but it was abysmally slow. I replaced it with a QNAP TS-419 Pro which worked quite well but I couldn’t use clustering features of Windows 2008 with it.

Then I bought a 2nd NAS, a QNAP TS-659 which has all the support I wanted. “Enterprise features” at a reasonable price

So the lab is now running ESXi on the same two Intel DQ35JOE motherboards, that I rackmounted to save space. The TS659 is configured with 4 x 1TB disks, configured as two RAID1 arrays. One  holds the VM Guests, the other holds the templates, backups, Guest OS installation ISOs. I still have two empty slots in case of future storage needs. Both arrays are presented as iSCSI targets to the ESXi servers. As for the TS419, it is used as general data storage (file server, backups for the workstations, etc.)