VM Host SAN/Network Design

[MarshallX]

Hey guys, I'm building and trying to figure out a hypervisor network for a home lab and have come up against a few stumbling blocks. My proposed network is whats drawn out in the fancy ms paint image.

Now I have zero practical experience with infiniband, which is why I've started this endeavor. I've got dual 20gbps infiniband adapters in each machine. I'm curious on a few things,

1) I want the datastores to be stored on "Datastore Host" but I'm not sure how to go about that. Is there a way to create a share or maybe iscsi target, etc on say Windows server 2008r2 that would work? What would be the better performing solution?

2) Host1 will run the virtual machines and since I have Essentials not Essentials plus, I cant vmotion the virtual machines. My plan was to have the machines stores in Datastore Host added to inventory on both hosts, but to have them off on one host until completely shutdown on the other host, before turning them on, on host 2. Will this cause any corruption of the virtual machines, if vmswap and all vm data is stored on the Datastore Host?

Any other input (constructive) would be greatly appreciated!

[Ethan44]

Hi

Welcome to the communities.

You need to create one volume on data store and specify that folder path inside the volume .

Take care!

[Gortee]

Morning,

I will try to answer you questions:

1) I want the datastores to be stored on "Datastore Host" but I'm not sure how to go about that. Is there a way to create a share or maybe iscsi target, etc on say Windows server 2008r2 that would work? What would be the better performing solution?

->If using Windows Server your best bet is a iSCSI target since NFS and Fiber channel is not supported out of the box.  The best performing solution would be a storage array.  This type of solution will break down on the windows IO side long before the line speed is reached.  In addition the que depth will run out before your bandwidth does.

2) Host1 will run the virtual machines and since I have Essentials not Essentials plus, I cant vmotion the virtual machines. My plan was to have the machines stores in Datastore Host added to inventory on both hosts, but to have them off on one host until completely shutdown on the other host, before turning them on, on host 2. Will this cause any corruption of the virtual machines, if vmswap and all vm data is stored on the Datastore Host?

->It would be a bad idea for them to be in the inventory of each host.  Have them active on one and then bring them up on the other in a failure by browsing the storage.   Corruption is possible.

I do a solution just like this for my home lab but I use Linux for the storage back end it allows me to use ssd for caching which speeds up the whole process.

Let me know if you have additional questions

Thanks,

J

[john23]

Lot of software storage appliance is available, which you can try. For windows environment I am not sure:

    check openiscsi,stormagic etc.