Servers with lots of DAS for use with ESX 3.5

[mattjk]

Hi all,

What types of servers are people using when they need/want to use DAS for storage with VMWare? I'm talking about servers which can take 1 - 2 TB of local storage.

I ask because I'm putting together some budgets, and most of the units from the major vendors (IBM, Sun, HP, etc) on the HCL don't seem to be able to cope with a lot of DAS - e.g. DL380 looks like it takes a maximum of 6 x 146GB drives, and those disks are 2.5" form factor so they're expensive.

And finally, before someone tells me to looks at iSCSI SANs: I don't want to use DAS for our VMWare project, but I figure it'll be easier to get the $$ for the SAN approved if I can say "look, the real cost of the SAN isn't $40k, it's only $20k because doing this with DAS will cost $20k anyway".

Thanks!

[weinstein5]

Just remember with DAS you lose higher order functionality such as VMotion, VMware DRS and VMware HA - which is used to justify the higher cost of share storage -

[DCasota]

Hi,

To be precise: If all ESX are connected to the same DAS (direct attached storage) by a SCSI adapter, enterprise features like VMotion, DRS and HA will work. However the amount of connectable ESX is limited to 2 or 4 (depends on the DAS model).

[DCasota]

Hi,

There are SMB iSCSI storage arrays (example: HP MSA15010i) with 1-2TB which are below of $20k. A DAS might be cheaper however it's limited to usually 2 esx hosts (with some models 4 hosts can be connected) and there is no interface redundancy.

The interface redundancy (2,4 or 6 * 1GBit) can be used for teaming or failover. With more interfaces you are even able to optimize your backup with a separated VCB backup network channel. You don't have this flexibility with a DAS.

Hint: To get best performance use dedicated switches, iSCSI HW-HBAs and Jumbo Frames activated.

[BUGCHK]

The HP Proliant DL series is positioned for "rack optimization". If you want many PCI slots and/or local disk drives, you should look at the ML series.

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

DL380G5 takes 8 SAS/SATA Drives. That is quite a bit of space when you talk about 300GB Drives (2.4TB).

However it is lacking in PCI slots, only 4 available with a riser card.

Older DL380s take only 6 SCSI drives and have only 3 PCI slots. That is true. But with 300GB drives that is still 1.8TB of storage.

Tie a pair of fully loaded DL380 with LeftHand VSA and you have a huge data store. It really depends on WHAT you want, how much of it you want and how you want to tie it all together. But if you want more than this, you are looking at attached MSA50s for HP systems which can hold 14+ drives. But as Bugchk mentioned the ML series may be best.

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