Enthusiast (127 points)
I love working together with small business owners and IT managers to help solve problems. The most common problems we are working to solve are replacing old physical server hardware with VMware and leveraging the capabilities of VMware to enable to simple, affordable Disaster Recovery (DR) plan that works without breaking the bank. While working at the whiteboard together, there is typically a lot of smiles and "ah-ha!" moments until reality kicks in: that's when we see the price of a scalable, highly available SAN. Most of the time this price is at least 50% of the total solution cost. This has typically put the breaks on our projects and we have resorted to local storage in the servers, VMware Foundation (no HA, VMotion or DRS) and either Vizioncore or Veeam to provide some higher availability and DR ability. Throughout all of 2008, I've known that there is a cheaper SAN solution for my small biz customers, that won't break the bank, is greener then an entry level SAN, and can provide for advanced enterprise features of VMware: it is a virtual SAN appliance!
A virtual SAN appliance is a VM that uses the local storage in a VMware ESX server and then presents that storage as an iSCSI SAN. You can make one with any of the software SAN providers our there: DataCore, Lefthand, StorMagic, Sun, OpenFiler, or you can even roll your own with your favorite Linux distribution if you dare. Ideally you would take 2 ESX servers with local storage and create two virtual SAN VMs and choose a software product that allows for mirroring between the two VMs. This solution enables VMware HA, DRS, VMotion and the ability to survive a single server (SAN node) failure. In the future, I wouldn't be surprised if VMware includes this functionality in future releases of their product, but for now you'll need a third party to deliver the virtual SAN. Yes, a virtual SAN will perform a little slower than a hardware SAN, but advances in server hardware and future release of 64bit ESX4, will greatly reduce the performance impact of the overhead introduced by the virtual SAN VM. Small businesses typically do not have large workloads that will require a hardware SAN solution.
These solutions are a big win for VMare, because it enables small businesses to purchase VI3 Enterprise (~$15K) when before they were only purchasing VI3 Foundation (~$3K).
Small Businesses win because at the end of the day, they get higher availability, increased ease of management, load balancing, and at a lesser price tag than if a hardware SAN was required.
VARs win, because we get added professional services needed to help setup VI3 Enterprise and SAN for small business.
And Mother Earth wins because we can use existing ESX server hardware and don't have completely separate SAN hardware!
Watch this space for more information on the virtues of using Virtual SAN Appliances. I will be throwing StorMagic's SvSAN in the lab later this month and will likely be throwing a virtual SAN into production in the next couple months. I look forward to sharing my best practices here on this blog and within the VIOPs community. Please reach out if you have questions, experience to share or would just like to heckle me.
