Is this setup viable?

[davidarnold]

Good afternoon all,

I was hoping for a bit of advice as to whether this iSCSI SAN setup would work, or any reason why it shouldn't.

ESXi Host:
Esxi 4.1.0

Dell R310, Intel Xeon L3426, 16GB RAM, Dedicated Port for iSCSI crossover connection to SAN

SAN:

Dell R510, Intel Xeon L5609, 12GB RAM, Dedicated Port for iSCSI crossover connection to Host, Perc H700 Integrated Raid Controller

OS: Ubuntu 12.04 using iscsitarget to present LUNS

HHD:  4 x 2TB SAS 10k in RAID 6

The idea of the setup is to test performance of SAN storage for some of our servers. If this works we would look at redundant switches/nics etc.

Thanks

David

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Community - I do not see why that would not work - 

[davidarnold]

Thank you very much. I'll crack on with it and see how it goes.

[mcowger]

It will work - however, its not supported (which is fine for just a test) and not at all a good indicator of performance of a SAN array.

[davidarnold]

Hi mcgower,  Thanks for your reply. May I ask why it won't give a good indication of array performance? It will be setup as a SAN would be. Is it only due to the fact it is not supported or do you have other reasons to believe it won't be a good performance indicator?  Regards, David

[mcowger]

Running an iSCSI target on commercial level gear with a totally commodity operating system like Ubuntu won't get you the performance that a dedicated system likely would.  Not to mention that pretty much every real array has more than 4 drives.

[davidarnold]

Thank you for the info. I am also thinking of checking out OpenFiler. So long as I stay within the IOps capacity of the disks I am using I would hope for some reasonable performance. I am aware I won't get anywhere near the performance of specialist hardware, but I've to do this testing on a very limited budget.

[mcowger]

You will get some level of performance.

My only point is it WONT be a good indicator of what a real, purpose built array will do.

[davidarnold]

I understand.  Thanks for your help.