As my Virtualization environment grows i decided to go for shared storage (via NFS async) with a dedicated vmfileserver. I decided to go with raid5 for the start as raid10 would be far better performance wise because most vm access is random IO, but i wanted a bit more space to experiment with everything.

I just took old hardware parts i had lying around to build it:

• Core 2 Duo E8400
• 4GB DDR2
• 2x Intel Desktop Gbit Adapter (one for each vmserver)
• 5x 1TB WD Red
• 16GB USB thumb drive for OMV
• silenced case

The software setup was the same like my storageserver at that time, except for encryption as the C2D doesn’t support that via hw-acceleration.

Surprisingly all my vms where as fast as i would expect them to be, even though they ran off raid5.