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vitaprimo
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Can hosts' local storage be shared?

Can local block storage be shared on the network using some storage adapter in vCenter? Or maybe as iSCSI targets? I keep seeing mentioned LUNs and multipathing in vCenter when I go into a local device adapter so it sort of gets my hopes up of maybe setting something like a cluster or whatever. What about VVOLs? Can hosts be providers?

I'm looking for an alternative to vSAN. Is there too much of a performance hit if I set up a NAS OS VM on each host with raw device mapped-disks and then share them over iSCSI or NFS back with the hosts?

Right now I have two hosts --well, three but I only want to use these two-- that have several unused disks each, no SSDs though, that were discarded when the centralized storage was upgraded, all of these disks were used for a very short time, just a little over a week, so they're basically new. The central storage only has a 4Gbps aggregated link to the network while the ESXi hosts have 10gig links each, plus another 3 gigabit cards as failover.

So, besides avoiding the central storage's network bond to become saturated, I'd like to make use of all of the extra space that's just spinning there without any use.

I'll appreciate any advice. Smiley Happy

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daphnissov
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Lots of questions here.

Can local block storage be shared on the network using some storage adapter in vCenter? Or maybe as iSCSI targets? What about VVOLs? Can hosts be providers?

No, not natively.

I'm looking for an alternative to vSAN.

For alternatives, if you still want a distributed storage system (and you should), then there are few options. One of those is StarWind.

Is there too much of a performance hit if I set up a NAS OS VM on each host with raw device mapped-disks and then share them over iSCSI or NFS back with the hosts?

This is generally a terrible idea because of the levels of abstraction you're shimming against the ESXi host.

Provided the hardware is compatible, you really should be looking at vSAN because it's going to be the best option for what you're doing while giving you enough performance and resiliency to run production-grade workloads on top.

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daphnissov
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Lots of questions here.

Can local block storage be shared on the network using some storage adapter in vCenter? Or maybe as iSCSI targets? What about VVOLs? Can hosts be providers?

No, not natively.

I'm looking for an alternative to vSAN.

For alternatives, if you still want a distributed storage system (and you should), then there are few options. One of those is StarWind.

Is there too much of a performance hit if I set up a NAS OS VM on each host with raw device mapped-disks and then share them over iSCSI or NFS back with the hosts?

This is generally a terrible idea because of the levels of abstraction you're shimming against the ESXi host.

Provided the hardware is compatible, you really should be looking at vSAN because it's going to be the best option for what you're doing while giving you enough performance and resiliency to run production-grade workloads on top.

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vitaprimo
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It's you again once more saving me from myself.    I recognize the pup, it looks a lot like mine.

I'm really thankful for your help; I ended up just getting a couple of SSDs and it's vMotions occur almost instantly, they take like a minute or so--not that they need to have to, everything's pretty much well-balanced but I've forced more than a couple just to see them happen.     When I bought the license I though I'd be able to figure everything out and I went with the one without support because it was really expensive for a tiny setup like mine but next time I'm definitely contacting VMware.  

Thanks again!

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