iSCSI Storage recommendation

[dmartinarc]

Hi all,

Anybody can advise me with one SAN to configure redundacy between 2 esxi?

I only will have 6-8 virtual machines, therefore i'm looking for a little storage.

Thanks in advance.

[hennie]

Hi there,

At home, semi-production environment, around 10-15 VM's, I'm working with 'Open Filer'  http://www.openfiler.com/

You can choose your own hardware and make your own preferences in that. I bought a standard pc-chassis, with 6x1Tb and a hardware RAID-controller, 3WARE 9650SE-8LPML, which was the most expensive part.

Hennie

[idle-jam]

you could look into lefthand vsa which convert a storage into an iSCSI SAN.

[dmartinarc]

I need it for a really critical environment but only for 5-8 VM.

Whats the best mode?

Thanks!

[mcowger]

If you need it for something *really critical* I'd say it *has* to be on the HCL.  Also, if its really critical, you need something with dual controllers, etc.

Maybe LeftHand (aka HP P4000), Dell Equallogic, etc?  They are both solidly overpowered for running 6-8 VMs, but they are basically the entry point for something acceptable for a really critical environment.

[dmartinarc]

and HP P2000? it would be enough?

[Bandeiraw]

http://www.stormagic.com/SvSAN.php 

If you problem is $  

[DJHamp]

We just got a EMC AX4 and its working great ~ $10,000

[depping]

The Iomega IX4 and IX12 are pretty cheap as well and support both NFS and iSCSI. Also are easy to configure, might be a viable option?

Duncan (VCDX)

Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive

[mcowger]

While the IX is a nice bix, its single controller and I would argue not appropriate for a 'super critical' environment.

[Josh26]

dmartinarc wrote:

I need it for a really critical environment but only for 5-8 VM.

Whats the best mode?

Thanks!

You have to be careful about saying "best".

Because is two HP EVAs (or soon, a 3PAR) in different buildings running Continuous Access, and VMWare Site Recovery Manager  to manage failover. Are you sure you want "best".

[depping]

You are right @mcowger, missed out on that.

The brand new VNXe 3100 - Dual Controller might be an option! It isn't that expensive and will also support VAAI in the future.

Duncan (VCDX)

Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive

[mcowger]

I agree with Duncan - the VNXe is an interesting product for something like this and is cheap (albeit less than 2 days old ).  Similar products could be LeftHand as a said, Dell EQL, Dell MD3000i, etc.

(disclaimer, I work for HP, which makes the LeftHand products and competes with, well, everyone else )

[WillL]

when will VNXe show up in HCL?

[depping]

I guess when it is GA. Currently is isn't even available as far as I know.

Duncan (VCDX)

Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive

[alittle158]

When you say a "little storage" for 6-8 VMs, how much space are you looking for?  40GB/VM or 500GB/VM?  The amount of storage needed can really start to raise the price with many of the higher end SAN solutions.

Since you said these are production critical, what are your uptime/HA/DR requirements?  Are these going to be in one rack, or spaced out between sites?

Our setup uses LeftHand P4000 series nodes in two datacenters with network RAID-10 replication, which gives us full redundancy even if we lose an entire datacenter.  We've been really happy with it, and have easily scaled it from 8TB to 26TB over the last couple years.

[lowteck]

Implemented a dell/emc clariion ax4-5i over a year and a half ago , and it has been rock solid.

dual storage processors, dual nics, dual power, dual ups, everything is redundant except the chassis.

navisphere 6

12 450gb SAS drives.

cost was around 20k, it would be much cheaper with fewer/and/or sata drives.

it's beast imho.

low

[Streetlights]

I've got a similiar build to spec coming up... probably going with p4000.

Did you go with hard or soft iSCSI initiators?

Whats your storage network setup?

Thanks

[lowteck]

we use software initiators.

The SAN was shipped with 10 450gb sas disks originally, which I setup as two raid5 disk pools.

I then bound a LUN to each using all of the space.

recently we added 2 more disks to fill out the dae, I added a disk to each raid group (took over 24hrs to transition).

and then I setup a lun on each raid group with the extra space and created meta luns out of the orignals.

This gave us two 2tb LUNs to present to vmware, which thanks to us having vsphere 4.0 we were able to extend vmfs on the fly.

Been very pleased with performance and ease of administration on this SAN.

low