Lab environment for vSAN, cost effective approach

[qhash]

Hi guys,

I am planning to build a small lab purely for testing purposes. I would like to end up having as good system as I can by terms of performance, however. The other thing is that lab should be as cheap as possible. There are some used DL160G5 units available cheap with 2 x L5630, 32GB RAM, P410i controller. After reading tons of article and KB articles I am close to be sure they are going to work for me.

Problem is the P410i controller. It can be switched to HBA mode ( http://www.vsm.com.au/ftp/P411/mode_p411.txt ) but doing so will disable SATA support. I need it as my cost effective approach involves consumer 2,5" SATA SSD drives in the budget.

My only option is to present every drive as RAID0. This is often not recommended. Can someone explain to me why? I would like not to be hit much on performance.

Motherboard of that server has two SATA ports. Maybe connecting SATA SSD to that port could work for vSAN?

I also wonder if I need to upgrade every server with BBWC512MB +battery. Not having them should not lower performance of my setup as I will not be using any RAID5 or RAID10 configurations. What do you think?

There is also another option - single DELL C6100 with 4 nodes, similiar CPU/RAM configuration, but within the budget only embedded SATA controller present in every node. Can it possibly work with vSAN?

Any input appreciated.

[zdickinson · Accepted solution]

Good morning, I hope all is well.

RAID0. This is often not recommended. Can someone explain to me why?

The main reason is that you cannot hot swap a drive in RAID 0 if you have a failure.  You must remove the drive from the disk group, down the host, replace the drive, create a new RAID 0, and then finally reclaim the drive.

Motherboard of that server has two SATA ports. Maybe connecting SATA SSD to that port could work for vSAN?

I have not done it, but all other posters who have used the onboard SATA achieved VERY poor performance.  The onboard is usually an older SATA with low queue depth.

I'm not clear on the question regarding the BBWC512MB.

DELL C6100 with 4 nodes

This would be great for vSAN, but you mention the embedded SATA controller.  For reasons listed above, I would avoid this.

Thank you, Zach.

[qhash]

Good morning,

Thank you very much for your comprehensive answer.

I will try to elaborate on with BBWC 512MB w/ battery connected. Having that one can use write cache on the controller without worrying about dataloss. With vSAN you do not implement any RAID at the node level (please correct me if I am wrong, i am just starting to learn the subject). Therefore, BBWC should not be a requirement for vSAN node server.

After reading your post I have found another C6100, much more expansive, but still in the range. It has a LSI SAS-9260-8i 6Gbps SAS RAID Controller in every node installed. This one is not present in the 6.0 HCL, just 5.5. I would like to study at most up to date platform, but maybe 5.5 will work just fine?

[zdickinson]

With vSAN you should disable all cache on the controllers.  If you cannot disable it, set it to 100% read.  Either way, I think you are correct; the battery does not matter here.

If it's just lab, you should go for the latest version.  It is vastly different than v5.5

Thank you, Zach.

[qhash]

Thanks again for your help.

I think I am going to buy C6100 with 3,5" bays, three per node. This one comes with no RAID card, so I can add H200 and flash it to IT-mode. H200 is reported to fit and work in C6100. The most important factor is that it is supported in 6.0 U2 and is super cheap.

[OANC]

How do you guys get the vSAN license on the cheap? its around like $8,000 last i check or is there another option?

[zdickinson]

Good afternoon, you can either do unlicensed for 30 days, maybe it's 60.  Or if you join the user group, a few hundred for a year, you can run it in non-production environments.  Lastly, for testing purposes you can do it with nested ESXi.  Thank you, Zach.

[roman79]

Hi there,

As an alternative, you can subscribe for VMUG Advantage and get EVALExperience (VMUG : EVALExperience) as part of it. It allows you to use VSAN licenses for three hosts (six sockets). The price is US$200 for one year.

Hope it helps!

Regards,

Roman