For a couple of days, I’ve been trying to find a way to implement a shared storage unit for use with vmWare ESXi servers.  I’ve been mostly looking at a free but pay for support product called “Openfiler“.  From the list of features on Openfiler’s web site, it appears to be just exactly what I need.  To be honest it does work as advertised and provides several ways for me to implement what I need.

But, there’s a problem.  The problem may simply be caused by the way that I’ve done things to this point, but it’s something that may prevent me from deploying this setup in production.  It’s performance.

Let me explain a bit.  To date, I’ve always purchased servers with enough internal storage to fulfill their roles.  This internal storage has been SCSI, SAS or SATA, but it’s always be directly attached to the server and has been very fast.

All of my tests, which have been non-scientific, have shown that moving data to and from the Openfiler box will take at least twice a long as the internal storage.  What’s worse is that my tests don’t include the heavy load of multiple virtual machines running on the shared storage.  My tests were done with a single virtual machine attached to the Openfiler box.  Nor do my tests show the impact of taking volume snapshots that I would depend on for backup purposes.

Anyway, I’ve created a video of one of the simple tests that I performed this morning:

If anyone sees a problem (especially one that can eliminate the speed issue) with this setup, please provide feedback in your comments.