SAN PURCHASE CUT, PLEASE HELP WITH LOW COST STORAGE SOLUTION

[Roysan]

Hello friends, due to recent budget cuts in our County, our SAN purchase was scrapped. I now have a Datacenter comprised of 3 - HP DL380 Servers, ESX v3.5.0 (163429), 8 VMs stored across three servers locally on 700GB free space RAID 6. I have licenses for VMotion, HA, and DRS. How can I utilize VMotion, HA and DRS without spending $5,000? Would I be able to get VMotion et al to work on a Buffalo TeraStation Pro II 4TB? (less than $2,000) Could I use one of the HP DL 380s and convert it into a NAS with FreeNAS? I need a dependable Storage solution that can keep me limping along. All suggestions are welcome! TIA

[dilidolo]

If you are willing to take risks for storage not in HCL, then yes. I've run storage on OpenFiler, FreeNAS and OpenSolaris, they all work. Personally I prefer Solaris as you can take advantage of ZFS. It has 80% of the features Netapp has but costs you nothing on software. You can also buy support from SUN. If you never run Solaris, then you might run OpenFiler because you configure everything from GUI and you can guy support as well.

[mjsvirt]

Have you had the opportunity to look at VSA's (virtual storage appliances)?

Take a look at Lefthand, FalconStor, Datacore, and others. They are a much lower cost alternative to the traditional HW SAN that turns internal host storage into a virtual san..

You will most likely hit the 5k limit though..

[azn2kew]

Another great VSA with redundancies is Xtravirt VSA other than that you can pretty much run low load production environment with Openfiler. You can have 8 x 1TB SATA drives stack up with Openfiler and utilize NFS/iSCSI if you wish and this seems to run pretty stable and nicely if you have good NICs/LAN network. I've heard good news about OpenSolaris if you can implemented it correctly. There is an expert about this OpenSolaris ZFS on the forum I have to find his blog though.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[azn2kew]

Here is the link in more details. link from Mike Laspina. Another good VSA free is Starwind iSCSI target, StorMagic support 2TB datastore as well.

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

[couak]

take a look at http://www.seanodes.com/exanodes/exanodes-virtual-machine-edition

the product is not in HCL but the day it will it could be an interesting solution