I'm in the process of buying new hardware for my VI3 installation.
I want to use iSCSI storage with Dell servers.
Can someone help me pick the most costeffective, reliable and scalable solution which gives the most throughput.
We are testing the HP MSA 1510i in our environment. It was easy to set up and configure and the price is right. It will scale from 1TB to 16TB using SCSI drives.
george
I do not know where you are, but in UK I did not manage to find any iSCSI unit that would be cheaper than Dell CX300 from www1.serversource.co.uk/ (fully warrantied refur units)
Seb
You should provide us with some more facts, like:
\- number of ESX hosts
\- estimated / expected storage size requirements
\- number of VMs
\- required SAN features (replication, snapshots, ...)
...
that's a very open ended question. you will get the Lefthand guys recommending their boxes and the EqualLogic guys pumping theirs. i suggest narrowing down the vendors (LH,EqualLogic,etc) based on your requirements (snapshots, replication, etc) and getting demo units and test the performance.
You should provide us with some more facts, like:
- number of ESX hosts
I will begin with two and maybe grow to about 4 -5 in a year or two
- estimated / expected storage size requirements
Hard to say, but I think 1-2TB should be enough for a while
- number of VMs
Not so many yet, but a estimate of 20 in a year wouldn't be too far off.
Few of the VMs will require heavy resources.
- required SAN features (replication, snapshots,
Don't need any advanced SAN features, the features in VI3 are sufficient.
I have no preference in storage vendors of iSCSI solutions.
The most important to me are:
\- stability / redundance
\- performance
\- scalable to my needs
\- compatible with Dell servers
\- price
I've looked at the Dell/EMC AX150 SAN, but it seems it only support slow SATA drives.
Based on what I've read in these forums (I use iSCSI only for test / dev) get some test boxes from Lefthand and Equallogic (and maybe others as well) and try them.
Equallogic seem to have good performance with good expandabilty.
Hopefully christianz and some other storage guys jump on in on this thread.
CX300i, QLA4050c or QLA4052C and ProCurve 1800-24G
you can put 2 QLA4050c in each server and do multipathing with 2x ProCurve 1800-24G and using both SP's of the CX300i
the HBA's aren't cheap thouh and in the end going fiber would be cheaper in the long run and you can pick 2GB FC HBA's off ebay for like 100pounds compared to 600pounds new, just buy more but haven't seen many fail
Message was edited by:
zbenga
I am actually in the middle of this myself. Here are my takes right now (just research, no first hand experience):
I have read great things about the Equallogic. Everyone who has one seems to like them. They offer alot of bang for the buck, plus no additional cost for extra features. You get cool stuff like thin provision, snapshots and replication. They offer SATA and SAS options. They also have the ability move volumes between boxes (ie SATA array to SAS array) without downtime.
LeftHand seems to be in roughly the same class as Equallogic. They offer some pretty cool stuff such as network RAID. What I, and more importantly my boss, don't like is the amount usable space versus raw space. By the time you factor in RAID for each individual box plus network RAID you lose a pretty large amount of your RAW disks.
NetApp offers NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, and fiberchannel all in one box. They also offer what they call no duplication volume cloning. This can potentially save a significant amount of disks space because they only need to save the differences between volumes. I am not sure if I like this with ESX or not because you have to mount a volume for each virtual machine. So if you want 20 virtual machines you will have to mount 20 individual volumes. These are also RDM virtual machines. In addition to no duplication they also offer de-depulication. This is a big plus as far as I am concerned. NetApp also offers agents for certain applications (Exchange, SQL, etc.) to quiesce the machines before snapshots.
Thin provisoning has issues. I have a Equallogic with thin provisioning enabled but the Equallogic space being used is a lot more than what ESX reports back in vcentre of du -h.
The volume on the Equallogic keeps growing until it goes past its warnings.
This is from the Equallogic support mentions.
A thin-provisioned volume grows automatically due to application data writes. If later the application frees up space, the space is free in the file system but is not returned to the free space in the PS Series pool. The only way to reduce the physical allocation is to create a new volume, copy the application data from the old volume to the new, and then delete the old volume.
When the volume goes to 100% it will go offline.
The vmfs file system will not use the free space so once it is written to you can say goodbye to the space.
This feature is hyped as a good idea by Equallogic but VMWare warns of these issues.
Equallogics solution is
The only way to reduce the physical allocation in the SAN is to create a new volume, copy the application data from the old volume to the new, and then delete the old volume.
This is not a solution!!!!!!
We are testing the HP MSA 1510i in our environment. It was easy to set up and configure and the price is right. It will scale from 1TB to 16TB using SCSI drives.
george
