Lefthand VSA Questions

[Khue]

I saw there were some VSA posts, but most of them were over a year old. I am looking for a solution for a DMZ environment. I have 2 stand alone esx servers both with a 500+ gig raid 5 array. I would like to gain some of the features and functionality of DRS and HA but implementing a SAN system for just these 2 ESX hosts seems a bit overkill. Does the VSA product solve this issue? From some of the articles I've been reading, it sounds as if the product exposes the storage volumes on multiple ESX servers as iSCSI initiators then through some sort of technology is able to cluster them. The end result is that the islands of storage that you had at one point now appear to be a single cluster and the storage functions just as it would on a SAN. If one of the islands goes down, the storage is arranged in such a fashion that HA/DRS will be able to sense this issue and activate the affected virtual machines on other hosts sharing the VSA storage solution.

Am I somewhat in the ballpark? Any documentation or supplementary info would be appreciated!

[mjsvirt]

Yes your descritpion is definitely on the right track.

Lefthand, Falconstore, Datacore and a few others offer these options.

[Khue]

Which of the products listed plays the best with VMware? Specifically ESX 3.5. Also does SANmelody fit in this category as well? That's another product I've heard about.

[mjsvirt]

I believe they are all on the Vmware HCL and work with ESX 3.5.

Several even have plugins for SRM if you needed to use that.

SanMelody is also an option in this space.

[mreferre]

Khue,

you might find this useful to your (business) case:

http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2008/05/19/121.aspx

I wrote it a year or so ago but the fundamentals are there (and yes you are on the right track).

Massimo.

[azn2kew]

There are a few virtual storage appliances in the market and Lefthand's and Datacore are among top players in the field but you can check out prices/performance comparisons for all of them before you decide to implement them. Datacore also has enterprise base SANSymphony you can check them out 30 days trial. You can be confidence with Lefthand VSA solution since HP acquired them and they performance is pretty decent and easy to configure. If its for low/medium storage requirements, I would use them but for large scale, using physical SAN (NetApp, EMC, Dell, HP) gears are suitable.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[TomHowarth · Accepted solution]

The Lefthand VSA is perfect for what you need to do, not only does it present the storage as an iSCSI target, it replicates itself to each node in a mirror or even RAID 5 type method. meaning that a loss of host would not mean loss of data.

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Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780136083214]”. Currently available on roughcuts

[azn2kew]

You can use a free tool by Xtravirt VSA, which does similar failover on iSCSI SAN but might have limitations. Feel free to check them out www.xtravirt.com

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[admin]

Has anyone run the Lefthand VSA on MAC/Fusion? I'm able to fire up the VSA VM and manage it from the CMC but the VSA does not see any disks.