ESX on StoreVault S550

[reggaethecat]

Hi all, I would like some advice.

We have 2 sites, our HQ and a DR site 5 miles away. They are linked together by 100MB LAN extension.

We will have an ESX host at each location, connected to its own SAN. Initially we were going to go for an HP MSA1000, but it turns out not to suit our needs. Another supplier recommended the StoreVault S550, which we could load up with 12 x 1TB SATA disks for the same price as the MSA would be with only 14 x 300GB, plus you get all the backup and replication features.

My question is: is the performance of the SATA disks likely to be an issue? I had a conversation this morning with a NetApp reseller who basically said "no no no" to SATA and strongly advised us to go down the SCSI/SAS route. The problem being that the SCSI disks are twice as expensive and three times smaller, and we are on a very tight budget that has already been approved.

Eventually I'm sure we will add two or three more ESX hosts to the SAN at the HQ site and altogether we plan to virtualise approx 50 servers.

What is the thinking on SATA SANs, and/or the StoreVault S550 (or equivalents from other vendors). I suppose we would ideally like a SCSI SAN for the same price as a SATA one, but I doubt it will happen!

Any advice greatly appreciated.

[pdrace]

I've run vms on Sata (Netapp 3020) without a problem. I don't know much about the Storevault line. We are building a DR site and will be using all sata disk there for ESX and our Oracle databases. It's a question of how I/O intensive the vms are and if you can feed them with that many spindles. You will have 11 active drives if you go with double parity and 1 hot spare.

[reggaethecat]

Thanks pdrace.

Does anyone else have experience they can share of running VMware on a SATA SAN?

[kjb007]

The difference in I/O between SATA and SCSI is about 1/3 the number of I/O per second. The difference in price, however, is much greater. As stated, it will depend on how I/O intensive your applications are, vs how much data you want to push over those disks.

-KjB

[reggaethecat]

Thanks. I suppose most of the IO requirements will be relatively low: we will have a mixture of smaller SQL databases on there, an Exchange server (only 250 mailboxes), 3 or 4 Terminal Servers, a few IIS servers and a file/print server. We have made a decision that we won't put our bigger SQL databases on there if we can't guarantee the performance, so that isn't something we are too worried about. We won't have any Oracle/SAP or anything like that.

Our original supplier has just recommended an HP MSA2000 which can take both SAS and SATA disks so there is flexibility there, although we wouldn't get the capacity we hoped for without multiple chassis.