New to vmware - need some tips about design

[pauska]

Hi everyone.

I have been crawling through these forums the last few days picking up hints and tricks - I greatly appriciate all the helpful posters!

I'm a little confused about how I should design my vmware solution. This is the hardware I'm getting:

• 2x HP DL380 with 2x4core, 8GB ram, 2x Qlogic FC HBA (4Gb) and a HP quadport GigE NIC (totalling 6 NIC's including onboard)

• 1x Nexsan SATABoy FC enclosure with 2 controllers (2 ports on each controller)

• 2x Qlogic 5600 FC fabric switches

I'll ask help about the network design later, the SAN is the tricky one (I have no experience with fiberchannel). The vmware SAN deployment guide is useful, but the part that confuses me is that I have 4 ports on the Nexsan array. The salesperson says that its capable of running active/active, but how will this work with 4 ports? should i just use one port on each controller and leave to ports free for other uses?

I've attached a visio design of how im thinking that this should be done - any comments are greatly appriciated!

[Texiwill]

Hello,

You should have 2 ports per Storage processor. You send port 1 to switch 1, port 2 to switch 2..... On the other storage processor you do the same thing, then you have 4 redundant paths. The drawing you have has only 2 redundant paths (for example my MSA1000 only supports 2 redundant paths).

Nexsan should have some diagrams on their site on what is possible perhaps in their user's guide, but with 4 ports, I would add the redundancy. I just went through the documentation nexsan provides, it is not what you want. You want a Multipath Fabric setup. You may need to call Nexsan to get their wiring diagrams as some hardware has different requirements on how the ports are used.

Also, you really do not define your vNetwork, what are you considering doing? I suggest the following:

2 pNICS vswitch0 for SC

2 pNICS vswitch1 for vMotion

2 pNICS vswitch2 for VM Network

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[pauska]

Thanks for the response Texiwill!

OK - I'll try to set up 4 paths to the storage processors with controllers on both switches.

Do you have any ideas if full active controllers will work? From the nexsan manual:

"With ‘Four Port active-active' all the fibre ports are active. Both ports on a controller show the same LUNs but have different WWNs. So each LUN that is mapped has two paths to it. To the OS a disk mapped this way will look like two disks. This is why a solution like this requires third party software in order to load balance and failover correctly. With qualified failover software installed (Veritas DMP for example) the OS will see a single disk for each LUN. The OS will be aware that there are two paths and in the event of only one path being available (due to a controller failure or link failure) the OS will switch to the surviving path, with no user intervention required."

Is this something that will work with ESX and my FC setup?

Regarding network: I havent really started planning it yet. I don't have vMotion (I have a standard license with just HA), so maybe I dont need to use all of the NICS?

[pauska]

Hi again - an update:

The Nexsan can run active/passive+active/passive, is that a better choice? Nexsan says that it enables failover without needing special software.

I've also attached a updated visio drawing of the set-up. I'm still trying to figure out if my HP ProCurve 2810-24 switches can do this network setup.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Not sure which you should do, 4 port active or active/passive-passive/active. Either should work, however, I think APPA will work fine. However, you should check with Nexsan on the exact wiring you can use. For example, on some HP Sans crossing the cables as you do will not work.

As for not having vMotion, you do not need to use those pNICs for anything until you need them then. Sort of a spare. I have a few customers in this situation as well, but they plan on getting vMotion next year so we allocated the pNICS for vMotion but they are not connected to anything yet. At the moment, they use them for adding bandwidth as needed to the VM network.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[pauska]

Thanks again for the quick response.

I just got a confirmation from Nexsan tech support that active/active-active/active supports MPIO, and that active/passive-passive/active does not (weird..).

It's funny that you mention HP - I actually "copied" their setup for a HP EVA SAN against VI3 (link: )

Regarding crossing the cables: Are you sure that you didnt accidentally confused my network (ethernet) for being a SAN? What do you exactly mean by crossing cables?

It seems to me that Nexsan doesnt have any exact wiring diagram. I got a redundancy PDF from them (attached), maybe you could take a look at it?

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

No I did not confuse the two... However, NExsan is not being very helpful if they can not show you how to wire it to your switches. With AA/AA it looks like you need 4 switches to me. But it may just be 2 cables per switch. Other than that your diagram looks fine.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[pauska]

Thanks again for the response - I'm going to close this one up and repost a new thread if I encounter issues while setting the Nexsan up (I probably just have to figure things out on my own without help from Nexsan)

Points awarded!

[GaryMWatson]

Thanks again for the response - I'm going to close this one up and repost a new thread if I encounter issues while setting the Nexsan up (I probably just have to figure things out on my own without help from Nexsan)

Points awarded!

Arrrgh! I hope you got everything sorted out OK and I apologize if our tech support guys didn't get you the information you needed. We have many people who know how to set this up so if you have any issues please contact our support team, or if for any reason that's not enough, feel free to contact me directly at gary dot watson at nexsan dot com.

Gary Watson, CTO, Nexsan Technologies

[bwbecraft]

Texi always has his stuff straight.

[jguidroz]

On your servers, I would suggest buying HP DL380G6 servers. This will give you the latest processors and also 4 onboard nics. If you are going to add additional nics, I wouldn't buy a 4 port card, but two two port cards.

How many VMs do you plan on running on your two hosts? Do you plan on using HA?