So after someones request I decided to write a blogpost about this
We needed a new storage server in our lab enviroment. Now we could have bought a all purpose SAN or NAS, but we decided to use regular Windows Server features with Storage Spaces, why? Because we needed something that supported our protocol needs (iSCSI, SMB3 and NFS 4) and Microsoft is putting alot of effort into Storage spaces and with the features that are coming in vNext it becomes even more awesome!
So we specced a Dell R730 with alot of SAS disks and setup storage spaces with mirroring/striping so we had 4 disk for each pool and 10 GB NIC for each resource.
So after we setup each storage pool, we setup a virtual disk. One intended for iSCSI (Vmware) and the other Intended for NFS (XenServer) lastly we had one two-disk mirror which was setup for (SMB 3.0) so since this is a lab enviroment it was mainly for setting up virtual machines.
Everything works like a charm, one part that was a bit cumbersome was the NFS setup for XenServer it requires access by UID/GUID
The performance is what you would expect from two-way striping set on SAS 10k drives. (column size set to 2 and interleave is 64kb)
Since we don’t have any SSD disks in our setup we don’t get the benefit of tiering and therefore have a higher latency since we don’t have a storage controller cache and so on.
Now for Vmware we just setup PernixData FVP infront of our virtual machines running on ESX, that gives us the performance benefit but still gives ut the storage spaces that the SAS drivers provide.
Now that’s a hybrid approach