Is NAS a virtual machine or a physical server?

Question

Computer networks

For personal needs (training) I assembled a virtualization server (ESXi 5.5) on desktop hardware (Asus M5A78L-M USB3, AMD FX6300, 24GB RAM). I want to create a network storage with shared access on my home network.
I ask the community for advice - what is the best thing to do: raise a NAS inside ESXi or assemble a separate server from existing components, make ESXi diskless, and keep virtual machines on NAS (via NFS or iSCSI)?
Interested in the "pros and cons" of any of the solutions ... (with a separate server of minuses, so far I see two - noise and power consumption)

Answer 1

Local disks will work any faster than those given over iSCSI. If there is a desire to tinker with iSCSI, then this can be easily done on virtual machines. And in order not to produce hosts - NAS can also be raised in a virtual machine. Then you get by with one host - ESX on it, and everything else is already inside, including NAS.

Answer 2

Good afternoon.
I would make a separate server and deploy there, for example, openfiler - if necessary, it would just work. If there is a goal to deal with iSCSI and other related issues, then everything is the same, but on a bare GNU\Linux distribution.
ps Virtualka with NAS also needs to be launched somehow, and ESX is diskless for you;)

Answer 3

In such cases, they often make a virtual machine.
HBA is thrown into it in IT mode, disks are attached to it, and voila. The VMs themselves lie on the same disks. Access via NFS+cifs (the latter is convenient for Windows users, it is possible to work with snapshots through previous versions of files). There are very interesting options with ZFS. For example, napp-it . More details here with an example of a config and a benchmark.
Nuances: you need a processor with vt-d (your processor, EMNIP, does not have one); ZFS requires a lot of memory, and ECC memory is desirable; RAIDZ-2+ is a very tasty thing, especially for medium-sized arrays of relatively large disks, but it is difficult to expand pools there