I have access to a couple of different storage arrays, so I decided to see if Openfiler lags them significantly in performance. Turns out Openfiler does just fine. In fact, against a Dell/Equallogic PS5000E entry level array, my Openfiler install (running on a Dell 6950) is faster serving up storage for XenServer storage repositories. It’s a very simple test, and benchmarks always lie, but in a real world test, Openfiler on a Dell 6950 is faster than a Dell PS5000E iSCSI array.
Next up: Openfiler against NetApp.
The big challenge with this aporpach was finding the right balance of resources dedicated to the infrastructure but leaves me enough resources to actually launch a VDI session and use it.a0 What’s the point of creating a lab that can’t be used?a0 My lab machine is a Dell XPS 15 laptop with 8GB of RAM and an i7 processor.a0 You can get more details about my lab set up here.