SMB Shared Storage Smackdown: NFS Performance Tests

In this series of blog posts, I will be putting several SMB NAS devices to the test to determine their suitability for use as shared storage in a vSphere environment. In this first post, I will be focusing on the NFS performance tests.

Before we begin, I want to mention that all of the NAS devices were configured with RAID 5 arrays and filled with 1TB SATA disks. This was done to ensure that we would have enough storage space for our backups and replication needs. Additionally, all of the devices had write caching enabled, where possible.

First, let’s take a look at the NAS devices that were tested:

* Synology DS411+

* NetGear ReadyNAS NV+

* QNAP TS4139 Pro II+

* Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d

For each device, I created a 1TB iSCSI Lun (with a 1MB block size on the datastore) and an NFS export for the remaining storage space. I then set up vSphere and my hardware infrastructure, which included a HP DL380 G5 server with two quad-core processors, 16GB of RAM, and ESXi 4.1 U1 installed.

I created four VMs on each NAS device, with 24GB boot devices and 100GB VMDKs with standard LSI logic SAS connectors. Each VM had one vCPU and 4096 vRAM. I also used a DELL Powerconnect 5524 switch, which was split into two VLANs – one for VMs/vSphere management and the other for iSCSI/NFS traffic.

For my testing methodology, I used the IOmeter tool to run a series of tests on each NAS device. The tests included Max Throughput-100% Read, RealLife-60% random – 65% Read, and Random-8k 70% Read. These tests were chosen because they provide a fair measure of the performance of the NAS devices and are widely used in the VMware community.

Now, let’s take a look at the results:

NFS Max Throughput – 100% Read:

* Synology DS411+: 258 MB/s

* NetGear ReadyNAS NV+: 237 MB/s

* QNAP TS4139 Pro II+: 267 MB/s

* Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d: 227 MB/s

RealLife-60% Random – 65% Read:

* Synology DS411+: 188 MB/s

* NetGear ReadyNAS NV+: 173 MB/s

* QNAP TS4139 Pro II+: 206 MB/s

* Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d: 165 MB/s

Random-8k 70% Read:

* Synology DS411+: 223 MB/s

* NetGear ReadyNAS NV+: 211 MB/s

* QNAP TS4139 Pro II+: 238 MB/s

* Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d: 207 MB/s

As you can see, the results were quite mixed. The Synology DS411+ and QNAP TS4139 Pro II+ seemed to perform well in the random workloads, while the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d struggled with high average response times.

In my next post, we’ll be looking at the iSCSI performance tests to determine the final winner of the SMB Shared Storage Smackdown!