Low Cost NFS Appliances for XenServer, in the Virtualization + Server-Based Computing forum on BrianMadden.com

Greetings,

I need to put up a lab so I can get my hands on the Enterprise features of XenServer.
I need to do this on the cheap, but I want it to run well.
I'll have 2 chassis with 2 or 3 Windows Server VMs each. Low utilization, but one of them will be an Exchange server.

I certainly don't have the coin for a NetApp or something of that class. The Linksys NSS4100 is about right pricewise, but I'm concerned about performance.

Can anyone testify as to how the lower-end NFS boxes run VMs and/or suggest some units that will work decently?

Thanks!

Have you looked at Datacore's SANmelody?

http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmelody.asp

Have you look at Lefthand's Network VSA, Openfiler, FreeNAS, Xtravirt VSA? google them up and download and test them seems pretty good.

OpenFiler makes a pretty decent box for NFS especially for a lab...it's free and you can even find a VM appliance or it as well

Openfiler is good, but, their flavor of Linux is difficult to update the kernel drivers/modules for newer hardware. Openfiler is probably ideal with IDE/SATA and 1 generation old enterprise hardware. I had problems with the megaraid driver (for Dell's PERC 6/e,6/i) and HP's CCISS driver (for Smartarray 6) and getting the new driver into Openfiler was hell. Went to centos and used redhat packaged driver from both vendors. Got waaaaay better performance and reliability.

For a lab, just download centos or opensuse or ubuntu or other flavorite linux and use a built in NFS server package. You can even get the iSCSI Enterprise Target source and compile/install it to compare it to NFS. (NFS performance on the same hardware in a small environment smokes iSCSI performance since NFS has seperate io queues per NFS client. At least with VMWare and Xen it does)

Better still, if Linux isn't what you want, use Microsoft NFS server in Windows 2003/2008. Its not as fast as Linux, but for a lab, can do fine.