Storage Recommendations

[dflint]

We're a small shop running 2 ESX 4.0 Hosts currently with local storage only. We will be running SQL on 2 of the VM's.

I'm looking for advice on a shared storage solution with decent performance, fault tolerance, and scalable. Budget is $10,000.

The EVA4400 I've looked at is twice that.

[Lunddahl]

I have set up a few 2-3 host environments with a SUN STK2510 iSCSI Dual controller with 12 15K SAS drives, it's not as fast as local storage, but rock solid...

Sun STK-2500 Series is based on the same LSI hardware as the IBM DS3000 series and the iSCSI models works with both VI3.5 and VSphere.

- Ulrik Lunddahl - vExpert 2009

(If your question has been resolved please mark the answers as "Helpful" or "Correct".)

[mcowger]

The Sun 2500 series is very (as mentioned), as are their dedicated storage appliances (the 7000 series). The JetStor stuff is also very nice (dual controllers, FC or SAS, 12TB for < 9K).






--Matt

VCP, vExpert, Unix Geek

[sc_2111]

For small installation we've used HP MSA 2000fc series storage with great satisfaction .

Best regards

[bulletprooffool]

Have a look at this:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/231037?tstart=0

Wiorth negotiating with some of the bigs boys and seeing how far you get on knocking down the price?

If not, the least they'll do is suggest good entry level alternatives?

[dflint]

How does HP's MSA 2000fc compare with the older MSA1000. There's a used MSA1000 available locally.

Is there that big if a difference to justify buying the newer model?

Thanks!

[mcowger · Accepted solution]

The MSA1000 is terrible gear - I have my own horror stories on it, and so do many others.

The MSA2000 is very different hardware.

--Matt

VCP, vExpert, Unix Geek

[williambishop]

Have you thought about trying used gear? There's a huge market for it.

[TimPhillips]

Note, that for this you better to use iSCSI - in creates lower overhead than NFS, and better for use with DBs. Also if you interested in it, I would you recommend to test for the fist time perfomance and usability of iSCSI with software targets. Try Starwind, Datacore and Lefthand. Also, you may find interesting this blog about clustering SQL

[sc_2111]

MSA 2000 is not , in my opinion, even comparable to its predecessor MSA1000 .

Much more stable,scalable, performing ...

Lots of installation of MSA2000 Zero problem so far .