is iSCSI enough?

[DXS_Matt]

Hey everyone, I'm new to the whole iscsi debate, and have recently been tasked with upgrading our aging ESX infrastructure.

Here's what I was thinking.

Dell R900 - Quad Quad-Core @ 2.93Ghz & 64GB of RAM

Dell MD3000i /w MD1000 Slave

We currently have 20 active guests spread between 2 machines, and was wondering if iSCSI would suffice in a situation such as this.

Also, for the sake of cost savings in the short term, we have a das attatched to a Dell 2850, if we purchase the R900, can we simply move the das which has quite a bit of free disk space remaining on it over to the new machine, or will we have to format the das to get it to work on the new system?

Thanks Much,

Matt

[Exwork]

We're currently running an iSCSI SAN solution for many more guests than you're looking to run. Your problem is not going to be iSCSI, it will be whether your backend storage system can handle the disk IO you're going to be throwing at it.

[DXS_Matt]

Exwork, thanks for the feedback, the SAN's will be loaded with 15 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives each for a max capacity of 9TB non raided.

I was guessing that the spindle speeds would be the limiting factor in the equation which is why I chose the highest I could obtain.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Matt

[wapiti10]

iSCSI is all we use in our ESX environment. We have not had any issues. Recently we went through a Test Case Scenario for a Software that requires heavy IO and big chunk of resources and our SAN, Dell Equallogic, 15k 300GB SAS drives did Great! We also use a SATA based Equallogic Array for another part of our infrastructure and it performs wonderfully for our mix of App, File, and SQL servers...close to 29 total Servers.

iSCSI is great too because of the flexibility it gives you inside the OS with the software initiator. These are my 2 cents.

Thanks,

Dallas

[DCasota]

Hi,

As usual the answer is that it depends on your infrastructure. Have you done performance measures? You should track disk io and network io on the actual system. After that you can compare those outputs with typical data of SCSI vendors.

I agree with others: Dell Equallogic produces definitely the best iSCSI storages for mid-sized companies with a bunch of features like storage overcomittment, 256 snapshots per LUN, etc. Not to neglect: The webbased GUI is very comprehensive and intuitive.

However I would use dedicated iSCSI HW-HBAs and physical switches to use full performance and to separate the storage traffic.

About your question: What do you have on your old systems (Dell PE 2850): ESX3.5 or older?