ESXi setups

Q

QHalo

2[H]4U
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Sep 30, 2002
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I'm looking to hear from people that have created ESXi setups with two/multiple servers and DAS as their shared disk. What kind of hardware are you using and what kind of servers are you running on it and any performance stats.

Probably needs to be moved to the Storage Forum. :p
 
DAS is tough because there aren't too many solutions that support simultaneous access from both hosts, which is what you need. You'd probably be better off having a front-end machine present that DAS storage as either iSCSI or NFS storage to the ESX hosts. Similar to the Dell NX1950 solution.

The Dell MD3000i (notice the i as the normal MD3000 doesn't support shared storage) can provide iSCSI storage to an ESX cluster. If you're looking at a lot of storage and the need to replicate that storage, you might want to look at an EqualLogic setup instead as the purchase price includes all the snapshot/replication software you'd have to pay extra for with the MD3000i or EMC products.
 
Thanks for the advice. Much appreciated. The more and more I dug deeper into it, even setting up two ESXi machine in workstation and trying to present a shared volume to them brought me to the conclusion that this type of setup would be a mess without an iSCSI/NAS/SAN solution.
 
I just rolled out an ESXi cluster of 8 ESXi nodes and 3 Jetstor Fiber Arrays each node are HP DL380s w/ dual quad core cpu's and 16GB of RAM and the hypervisor is installed on a RAID 10 array comprised of 74GB 15k SAS drives

They have an iSCSI array if you don't have the budget for the fabric infrastructure. These are very nice and fast storage arrays with most of the features you're going to want for your ESXi servers.

The only other way you'll be able to achieve this, is utilizing a middleware environment like Tivilio SANergy or Veritas Cluster Server as what you are looking for is storage clustering. which is going to significantly drive your total cost of rollout through the roof
 
I'm in the process of migrating several roles to our newly deployed ESX 3.5 environment.

We are using Lefthand SAN's and I couldn't be happier. The way they utilize IP storage instead of fibre has a ton of advantages, and performance thus far has been excellent.

They are also very much in bed with VMware, and were just recently bought by HP.

Not a cheap option by any means unfortunately. I've dropped around 100k on 4 nodes.
 
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