Shared storage for XOA/XCPng VM's

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
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Spending countless hours watching every single video of @LTS_Tom and he is by far the most impressive content creator I have ever witnessed.
That being said, there is of course always that one piece of information that is missing and for me that is the answer to this question:

Watching for example How To Setup NFS With FreeNAS and XenServer - YouTube Tom is running VM’s directly from the NFS storage, and I’m wondering if this is something I could do in production. Say I have a TrueNAS Core server with SSD’s, dual CPU and a good amount of cores and RAM connected with bonded 10Gbps DAC cables to get 20Gbps. Could I run a dozen or two of LAMP servers close to SSD speeds, or would that be a dumb solution?

Ooh, and speaking of TrueNAS; I also keep wondering why everybody talks about lots (or high speed) cores and memory needs, when a Synolgy RS or FS server can provide fast 20-40Gbps throughputs with 8GB RAM and a relatively low end CPU. What secret sauce am I missing? :confused:

…exciting stuff and hopefully I will soon be in a position to also provide answers and not just bug everybody with question :rofl:

Robin

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Thanks for the kind words and running a few dozen servers on an XCP-NG based host with bonded NIC interface to TrueNAS with NFS is a very common setup and can be quite fast. Having plenty of memory on the TrueNAS server will help a lot with the VM performance due the the ZFS caching system.

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Thanks @LTS_Tom !!

You feel that a Synology FS2500 would not be an equally good fit? It looks very promising on paper and is a whole lot cheaper for a device I can connect with 20Gbps out of the box. What’s the catch when using something like this for VM’s, compared to say a TrueNAS R or X?

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Both are good choices, It comes down to the specs and drives. TrueNAS with ZFS overall is still my favored choice for enterprise performance and stability.