Lower tier storage suggestions

[taylorb]

So here's my setup: We've got a nice IBM DS8100 FC SAN for our critical stuff and less critical stuff is on local SAS drives on my ESX hosts. I'd like to enable Vmotion and other shared storage features for everything. So I was thinking about buying a server, loading Red Hat on it and attaching a bunch of SATA 7200RPM drives to it. Using NFS or a software initiator to attach them the ESX cluster. Does this sound like a reasonable plan for low tier storage? The VMs that would be on this storage are production, but have lower performance and uptime needs. I've had 10 of them on a single Raid 5 array with 4 10k SCSI disks with no complaints, so performance shouldn't be too much of an issue. Any other suggestions would be welcome. Data needed is about 2 TB and budget would be under $10K.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Here's a couple of similar threads to look at

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=654468&#654468

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=633419&#633419

[davidbarclay · Accepted solution]

You have an DS8100 and you are looking at a roll-your-own SATA box? Seem like one extreme to the other...

Why not do it "properly" and get an EXP810, some SATA FC drives and the intermix licence?

Just a thought. I'd hate to see you comprise the whole solution because of budget!

Dave

[taylorb]

You have an DS8100 and you are looking at a

roll-your-own SATA box? Seem like one extreme to the

other...

Why not do it "properly" and get an EXP810, some SATA

FC drives and the intermix licence?

Just a thought. I'd hate to see you comprise the

whole solution because of budget!

Dave

Yeah, that is probably a better solution. To be honest, I didn't know the DS8100 could use FC SATA drives. I just remember paying like $1500 a peice for our FC SAS disks and I know they wouldn't give me $20000+ worth of storage for this project. With the 500GB FATA Drives I might be able to get 2-3TB of slower disk for under $10K anyway.

Thanks!