Required Settings

 

After importing the VM to create the SoftNAS™ Virtual Storage Appliance VM, configure the VM Settings in accordance with the System Requirements recommendations.  The boot disk (hard disk 1) should be set to 30 GB, thin-provisioned.

 

If you aren't sure where to start out with resource assignments, use 4 vCPUs and 4 GB to 8 GB of RAM, then configure your storage and do some benchmarking and observe resource utilization in the SoftNAS StorageCenter Dashboard charts and Windows 2012 Resource Monitor or other performance charts.

 

RAM Note:  The operating system and SoftNAS consume up to 1 GB of RAM, using most of the remaining RAM for cache memory and metadata.  The more RAM you assign the VM, the better your read cache performance will be, as SoftNAS will keep as much data in RAM cache as possible.  If you are planning to use deduplication, then you will need to allocate additional RAM - at least 1 GB of RAM per terabyte of deduplicated storage, to keep the deduplication tables in memory (or supplement RAM cache with a read cache device).

 

Using Hyper-V 2012 with more than 4 GB RAM assigned to SoftNAS VM - there's a known issue with Hyper-V 2012 and Linux guests running more than 4 GB of RAM. 

There is a workaround available, which is posted here on the forums.

 

Hyper-V 2012 reboot required after adding many VHD's - after adding many VHD data disks are added to a Hyper-V 2012 VM, a "file busy" error may occur when the  VM attempts to start.  To resolve, reboot the Windows Server 2012 hosting Hyper-V.  More details in this forum post.

 

Hyper-V supports up to 64 data disks (VHD's) per virtual SCSI controller, and only 4 drives per IDE controller on a VM; therefore, we recommend adding a dedicated SCSI controller to the SoftNAS VM for your data disks on Hyper-V.

 

 

Other optional VM settings

 

Network Adapter

 

Since the SoftNAS VM runs the Linux operating system, it is required to install the Hyper-V Linux Integration Tools. 

 

SoftNAS for Hyper-V ships with these integration tools pre-installed, so network integration is already enabled.  It is a good idea to verify the latest version of these integration tools are installed.