[plug] SAN Advice

[Mark Slatem]

Our Budget is Max $25k, at the moment we have 3 x VMware ESX Servers
with each hosting 6-8 VM's. In the near future we would like to add a
dedicated box for Xen VM's as well, the rest of the rack consists of 4
Linux servers and 2 Windows (exchange + Blackberry). IMHO we are not
running any really IO intensive applications on any of our VM's at the
moment, but we do have a plan to create an additional Linux VM as a
secondary mail server running exim, clam, mailwatch, mailscanner, and
writing all to a MySQL Database, our current load on the mail is around
15 000 - 20 000 messages a day. 

Our requirements are: 

1 - Enable running virtual machines to be stored on storage device with
adequate performance between host server and storage device.
2 - Ability to move running VM's off a Baremetal ESX/Xen Server onto the
storage device temporarily should an ESX server need to be brought down
for maintenance or fail etc.
3 - Serve as a backup device for remaining servers in rack.
4 - As much bang for the buck! disk storage capacity as possible that
budget allows.
5 - would be nice if solution could scale easily as demand for capacity
grows. 
 

On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 09:16 +0800, Nathan Alberti wrote:

> What product are you using for virtual machines ?
> 
> I would suggest if you are "small budget" then a FC SAN is pretty much
> out so for VM's that leaves you ISCSI or NFS, both will give you good
> performance over GigE however (depending on the storage you decide to
> go with) NFS may give you some more flexibility at the filesystem
> level. 
> 
> Give us a better idea of your budget and your use case.
> 
> Nathan.
> 
> 
> On 10/26/07, Mark Slatem <slatemfam at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> 
>         Paul,
>         
>         Thanks for the advice and the link you provided. The inquirer
>         url shows the exact device we have been quoted on, the given
>         price includes 1 x 100GB and 6 x 750GB Seagate SATA Drives. At
>         the moment we are undecided on the SAN VS NAS, what is your
>         opinion on both considering we want to run virtual machines on
>         them. Also if we went for the "Intel Storage Creek 2" what OS
>         flavor would you recommend? 
>         
>         
>         Mark.
> 
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plug.org.au/pipermail/plug/attachments/20071026/e38a442b/attachment.html>