External storage

[pradeepraul]

Hi Guys,

I am planning to buy a Dell 1950 and install ESXi4 in it. I want to use external storage like the small NAS' available in the market. Any idea if I would be able to add those external storage into my datastore, if yes whats the method to do it?

Thanks

Pradeep

[Bartmosss]

I would recommend that you use some NAS on the VMware HCL. For a small setup, we are having some success with IOMEGA ix4-200d or other NAS in this series.

They do NFS and ISCSI, performance is ok. Sure it is still SATA drive.

MCP, A, Network, Linux+, VSP, VTSP, VCP

[pradeepraul]

Thanks for the quick reply. Do you know how much the one you use costs? I have a budget of around £300 for 2-3 TB of space. Any idea what to look for while buying (like iSCSI support, NFS, etc). I will use the storage to allocate space for Win 2003 VM's inside the ESXi 4.

[Feihong]

If you are going to use it for testing, why not to use software based iSCSI or NFS.

I am using Openfiler, Startwind and Celerra simulator. Good enough.

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[Bartmosss]

Iomega ix4-200d is the 4TB, so 4 x 1 TB SATA drive. With RAID5, it is giving 2.6 TB of usable space. I am in Canada and I can get those for about 900$ to 1000$ CAN.

MCP, A, Network, Linux+, VSP, VTSP, VCP

[pradeepraul]

Do you mean create the openfiler as a vm? I am talking about using external storage. Can you please give more details?

[Bartmosss]

It all depend of which use for your external storage.

If it is dev or testing environnement or learning, you could use some other server/pc and install Openfiler on this. You would have an ISCSI target / NFS share.

I studied for my VCP using this kind of setup.

I use my NAS to backup my VM with VMware Data Recovery...

MCP, A, Network, Linux+, VSP, VTSP, VCP

[Feihong]

Just another option for you. As you are buying a new machine for ESX, I guess you would have other machines as clients or PCs. You can install Operfiler (Linux base freeware) as a VM on a separate machine with vm workstation so that the ESX can connect to it using iSCSI. Openfiler can use a local disk or an external hdd.

Surely, a standalone external storage like iomaga gives you the ease of use. I don't have extra $ for it.

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[pradeepraul]

Thanks. I am aware of that from a tutorial. I am not going to use it for testing or training. This will be used in real life. So I wanted to know if the cheap NAS' available in the market support iSCSI or anything and if so how to map from Vcenter to the NAS.