Readynas and VMware VM's.

[ranj]

Hi

I have just purchased a Netgear Readynas box for home (the Readnas RND2000 XRAID NAS) and it seems like a great box to keep a backup of my critical data and stream music and video.

Now that will take about 100gb in space and i'll still have 400gb odd to play with and it got me thinking if I could host all my test VM's i have created using VMware workstation, at the moment I am using a local machine but its lacks disk space, I have tried putting VM's on a external drive and performance is ok on this as well but for me it would be ideal if i could store them on the readynas and open them up through VM workstation.

Obviously putting it on a NAS box could be problematic, has anyone tried doing this on one of these ReadyNAS boxes? its probably not designed for this type of data and traffic but if anyone has got it working i'd be interested to hear any feedback.

One of the potential problems I see is I am going to be running it through a wireless router with a 4 port 100mb switch and see that as a problem, would replacing it to a gigabit switch make a huge difference or would it still be slow?

I'd appreciate any advice on this.

Thanks

[EduTech]

Slightly Different, but we had a media server which died so i had to convert it to a VM. now as it was only a temp solition until we re-built our applications server i did not want to buy a new server for this to sit on.

the image turned out to be around 200GB in size and rapidly growing as it was also our staff shared area.

It has been running of a 4TB Buffalo NAS Box, and it actually worked although it did fall over twice and had a few data write errors but it has lasted a good 5 months so i generally think it is possible. not the best way obviously but it works.

Might be alot better for images that are not so huge! :-)

I can thankfully say now, that our staff shared area is now on the NAS box on its own and the new media server has been built just got to test a few more apps and then i can get rid of the large vm

James.