VM Performance for developers

[MaverickHL]

Hello,

I recently built a homelab for my working at home setup and so far it has been working well overall. However one of my developers raised in issue with the Windows VM performance for compiling their code being slower than bare metal and I was wondering if adding a pair of SSD for L2ARC and ZIL/SLOG will help improve said performance.

This is my current server setup:

MB: Supermicro X10SRA-F
CPU: E5-V2699v3
RAM: 256GB
Storage setup:
2 x 1TB NVME ZFS mirror for OS and VM

Planned to add:
2 x Kingston DC500 480GB for L2ARC + ZIL/SLOG

If someone has advice on this it would be great.

 

[csutcliff]

Have you verified that they are I/O limited?

That's a >10 year old Haswell CPU, I'm willing to bet that's your limitation, especially with all the security mitigations in place, we dumped the same gen xeons a number of years ago because they perform so badly with mitigations on.

Either way adding slower SATA SSD will likely only slow down the existing NVMe drives.

 

[MaverickHL]

For the nvme these were just out of shelf samsung evo nvme drives. If there is a difference set with better sustain performance other than the pro versions I will take suggestions. But this was mainly for the homelab use and to replace old dell work machines (optiplex 7050) that we had at our office so the specs were ideally close to them.