Hi All,
I've got hold of an old Dell powervault 220S Array which is an oldskool dual controller U320 job. What i would like to do is connect this up to a pair of Poweredge Servers and use the poweredge servers as a presentation layer for VMFS storage, either via iSCSI or NFS i'm not really fussed.
now i've tried this before using Windows 2003 R2 presenting NFS shares and MSCS but i did have some problems with the vmfs volumes getting disconnected if the NFS share failed over in windows and having to disconnect/reconnect the storage to get it to play ball again so i'm a bit aprehensive about repeating this type of setup. (even tho i'd use 2008R2 which may have improvements in this area...)
has anyone done anything similar and got somethign which actually works? perhaps using something like openfiler? the fact that openfiler hasnt been updated in over a year sort of puts me off... also all the "HA" stuff i've read on openfiler suggest people replicating the data between boxes, whereas i'm not doing that i'll still only have 1 backend datastore on the array.
the more "out of the box" the solution is the better. i'm sure i cant be the first person to want to do this, hell Dell even sell this same sort of setup as one of their entry level storage arrays (ie using wintel servers as a presentation layer)
or should i just give up and use a single connected non-clustered server to remove complication and if the server fails just swap that out (ie have no HA) am i introducing more problems by complicating things than i am fixing by going clustered/HA
Thanks guys
