SOHO Virtual Machines and Networked Attached Storage

[SimonMac]

You will need gigabit switch and decent cables to get the Gigabit connectivity (guess the mac mini also have Gigabit NIC). If the Mac mini don't have USB3 it's more than the 480Mbps of the USB2.

I have seen production ESXi and Hyper-V hosts running VMs on the back of 2-4 1Gbit NICs and iSCSI, so should be fine.

Try it and if it's too slow just go for USB3 HDD or SSD

At the moment I have an Ubuntu VM running some basic pyhton scripts, which I think shouldn't be too tasking as a POC, however ultimatly I want to use it to run a Windows VM with a few programs that I can't run on my MacBook (Visio/Project) again hopefully not very I/O intensive.

[sal]

Scrap that, it does have Gigabit ethernet, does that still make it dicey to use rather than psychically attached drive?

You will need gigabit switch and decent cables to get the Gigabit connectivity (guess the mac mini also have Gigabit NIC). If the Mac mini don't have USB3 it's more than the 480Mbps of the USB2.

I have seen production ESXi and Hyper-V hosts running VMs on the back of 2-4 1Gbit NICs and iSCSI, so should be fine.

Try it and if it's too slow just go for USB3 HDD or SSD

[SimonMac]

Scrap that, it does have Gigabit ethernet, does that still make it dicey to use rather than psychically attached drive?

[vwdan]

My advice is to grab something like a USB3 -> SATA adapter and then buy a new SSD, and just run them off that. Gonna be better than running them off a 10/100 NAS with big drives.

[sal]

There will be definitely performance degradation, the question is are you going to notice it. It all depends on what you are using your VMs for, but expect high latency.

A much better options are just a USB HDD attached to the MAC mini, or a dedicated server for your VMs, or a better NAS than the crappy WD with 10/100GB NIC

[SimonMac]

Ok, current set up is:

Mac Mini, 16GB Ram, 2.5Ghz Core i5 and 256GB SSD
WD-4100 NAS with 4 x 2TB Drives, RAID5

I run VirtualBox on the Mac Mini, and use the local SSD for the storage, works fine but obvisouly storage is at a premium so I would like to hive this off to the NAS.

The WD has the option for iSCSI which for Windows is native but has to be added onto MacOS, will I notice a performance degradation over iSCSI as the NAS is only rated as 10/100 Ethernet? Is there a better way of doing this?