What to choose as cheap storage for VMware vSphere ESXi?

Question

NAS

Good afternoon,

for a home lab on ESXi, I'm looking for a cheap storage option in order to get software RAID1 for virtual machines and maintain maximum performance. Transport via separate ethernet 1g/bit.
The hardware NAS option for SOHO is said to be slow. And the prices for Synology, QNAP are considerable. I don’t consider any DNS from D-Link: I’m afraid that I will spit.
I think in the direction of a separate piece of hardware, on which to deploy StarWind/FreeNAS/OpenMediaVault/Openfiler etc...

Or maybe not fool yourself and just buy a RAID controller for SATA drives?

In general, DAS / NAS / SAN, iSCSI / NFS is not important. It is important to get maximum performance without sacrificing fault tolerance.

Who has had experience? What do you advise?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I recommend considering two options:
1. If you don't want to spend money on a raid controller - StorageSpaces in mirror mode + StarWind vSAN Free. It is much faster than MS iSCSI Target even without cache. If you additionally add an SSD as L2 cache and enable RAM cache, you will be pleasantly surprised.
2. If you have something to assemble 2 hosts for storage - you can make a free StarWind a highly available SMB / NFS share and play around with clustering, failover of virtual machines and get even more performance due to network striping (MPIO in "Round robin").

Answer 2

Вот, если вам дадут столько денег.