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tcenturion
Contributor
Contributor

Open Filer Shared Resource in a ESXi Box

Hello Guys,

I'm posting here because I would like to know your opinion about an enviroment that I'm thinking to implement.

I have 2 brand new servers (DELL R620 - 16GB RAM - 2 Processors) and some new licenses for vCenter and vSphere.

During last weeks I'm studing hard all vCenter features to implement the best scenario in my company.

But, I have a problem. I don´t have a shared storage and there´s no change to buy one during this year. So most of vCenter features will not be possible.

I really would like to implement vMotion, HA and DSR.

Thinking that I would like to install a iSCSI solution (Open Filer).

Reading and Reading about that I could notice that it´s not possible to install DELL OMSA into a Open Filer box, so the monitoring actions will be degraded, and without a monitoring tool I'm feel blind.

My idea is:

- Install 6 disks in one of the new servers (RAID 5 or 10, I'm still thinking about that);

- Install ESXi 5.1 and deploy Open Filer inside it. (It will run only this VM), it might be a dedicated ESXi box just for Open Filer.

What do you think about that? Is it a good practice? Or I will have performance issues?

Nowadays I have 30 VM´s running locally in 6 different ESXi hosts. I intend to move the critical VM´s to Open Filer Shared Storage.

Thank you very much for your help.

Regards,

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EdWilts
Expert
Expert

I'm having difficulties following your logic.  You're concerned about implementing HA so that if a host fails, another host can restart the workloads.  However, if the ESXi box running OpenFiler fails, you lose all of your critical VMs until the Host with OpenFiler on it comes back up.

Without a shared storage solution, you might be better off implementing redundancy across your hosts on local storage.  eg, put a domain controller on each host.

If you go ahead anyway, don't use RAID 5 - that's just asking for issues. Use RAID 6, especially for supporting critical VMs.

.../Ed (VCP4, VCP5)
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tcenturion
Contributor
Contributor

Hello EdWilts, thank you for your reply.

Yes, you are right about the HA on ESXi Open Filer box, but my ideia is to keep this ESXi host out of HA.

The final solution will be.

(ESXi1 ---- ESXi2 ----- ESXi3 ------ESXn) in a HA ------> Connected in an Open Filer Shared Storage in a ESXi Server out of the Cluster.

Thanks for the RAID 6 tip, I'll take a look on it.

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