ESXi configuration planning question...

[morozov50]

Here is my situation. My company wants to get into virtualization but cost is very important. My proposal is a Openfiler San system. Here is what I have planned.

Openfiler-1 San

Openfiler-2 San

I have those two devices doing drbd heartbeat to keep for redundancy.

I have planned the following ESXi host configuration.

ESXi-1 connected to Openfiler-1 iScsi LUN

ESXi-2 connected to Openfiler-2 iScsi LUN

Both ESXi boxes will run ESXi 4.0 free. Both will be poweredge 2950 servers dual quad core xeon 2.5ghz processors. 32GB of ram in each, with 6 network cards. 1 network card for esx service console, 1 network card for iScsi connection, 1 dedicated nic for our SQL virtual server, 1 nic for backup of virtual machines, 2 nic's for the other virtual machines. What I plan is that with the san's doing drbd heartbeat if San1 would go down San2 would pick up. If ESXi-1 would go down i could bring the vm's up on ESXi-2. Basically a poor man's version of vmotion/ha etc (I know not quite the same, but MINIMAL downtime if something goes down).

Question 1 would be Do you think my configuration would work?

Question 2 is in the SAN configuration with cost being a major factor here is the situation:

We currently have a lot of data lets say close to 2TB. We have about 12 servers. Mostly file servers, utility servers, etc. We have 1 SQL server and 1 Exchange 2003 server. Currently most of our servers run on Sata drives in Raid5. Our SQL server runs on Sata Raid5. The only server that runs in Scsi Raid5 is Exchange. I know in the practical situation I want to have the SAN built with SAS drives but with cost that is probably not going to be real. Do you think if the SAN was built with 12 1TB Sata drives in Raid5, How much of a performance hit would Exchange take going from scsi to sata. With SQL running on SATA already, would it perform worse virtually on SATA or about the same as it currently performs physically on SATA drives. The network is not a huge network. We have about 20 client machines on this network.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[DSTAVERT]

It all depends. You don't give any details about the openfiler devices Platform/RAID cards/ cache levels/ RAID levels. You don't give any details about your current exchange load etc. What testing have you done with perfmon to give you any clues about what your current usage is. You can get many opinions but you need to do the work to determine the appropriateness of a solution.

So my answer is it will probably be OK.

[morozov50]

Sorry bout that. Basically as far as the openfiler configuration i'm looking to do

Openfiler-1

Poweredge 860 with 4GB ram. Dual Core 3.0Ghz Pentium D. External bay would be iStar dAGE1240-3MS 12-bay SAS/Sata device. The Raid card i'm using would be 3Ware 9690SA-8E. I threw together two proposals 12 SAS 15K or 12 SATA drives 7200. Both would be configured in RAID5.

As far is current loads, I have not done any testing with perfmon at this point. As far as exchange goes i'm pushing through combined in/out roughly 3K messages per 24 hours. The exchange messaging is the ONLY thing that server is being used for. I know this isn't much more info but maybe it can help a little bit.

[DSTAVERT]

You shouldn't have any problems with SATA and perfornance. Multiple NICs on the iSCSI side would be better.