A few weeks ago, I worked on setting up a Buffalo Terastation 3400 to store VMWare ESXi VM images.<\/p>\n
For flexibility reasons, I wished to use NFS instead of iSCSI, however I discovered that performance was absolutely dismal. Initially, I was only getting 6MB\/s write throughput via NFS on ESXi. However, mounting the same NFS mount from a Linux VM on the same ESXi instance, I would see 40MB\/s!<\/p>\n
After a couple of days of fruitless efforts and a call to Buffalo Tech Support, I finally found a solution.<\/p>\n
1) Make sure the Terastation NFS is in kernel mode, otherwise it won’t work at all with ESXi.<\/p>\n
2) Upgrade the firmware. Don’t believe the TS web GUI when it says its firmware is up-to-date. \u00a0 Mine said it had the latest, however when Buffalo USA Tech Suppport sent me to their website, I found a much newer version available.<\/p>\n
In my case, this upgrade boosted write performance from 6MB\/s to 40MB\/s.<\/p>\n
3) Changing from RAID 5 to RAID 10 decreased my usable space, but boosted write throughput to approx 70MB\/sec<\/p>\n
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A few weeks ago, I worked on setting up a Buffalo Terastation 3400 to store VMWare ESXi VM images. For flexibility reasons, I wished to use NFS instead of iSCSI, however I discovered that performance was absolutely dismal. Initially, I … Continue reading