ESXI, ISCSI, Fiber Target and Drive Bender

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cmacnichol

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Sep 3, 2014
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Alright, lets see what everyone makes of this. I currently have a need to centralize my storage and get some kind of backup plan in place. I do not have a lot of money to poor into it so I am making do with what I currently have, thought if I must get something I can work it out.. I will list what I have and what I am trying to do and feel free to tell me I am insane or if it might actually work. Or even if there is a better solution.

Current Hardware:
HP DL360 Gen5 Server
- Running ESXi 5.5
- One 2.6 Ghz Quad Core Processor (Soon to be upped to 2)
- 12gb of DDr2 667 ECC RAM (Soon to be upped to 32gb)
- Four 72gb SAS 10k Drives (Currently in a RAID 5 Setup)
- Six Gig-e network ports (2 on MB and 4 on a PCI-X card)
- One Qlogic 8gb Fiber HBA (Back Compatible)

HP N40L Microserver
- Running Windows Home Server 2011
- 8gb ECC Ram (Max on this model)
- Drive Bender (Latest Version)
- My Movie Server Add On
- StarWind ISCSI Software
- Three Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5Tb Drives
- Three Seagate Barracuda 1Tb Drives

HTPC - Streaming to a Xbox Extender
- Running Windows 7 32-bit (To be Upgraded)
- One Core 2 Duo E8400 3Ghz
- 8gb
- Only Windows Media Center
- Kingston 64gb SSD

eSata 4 Drive Enclosure (Currently Attached to HP N40L)
ZyXEL GS1100-24 24PORT Gigabit Switch (Does not Support Link Aggregation)
One Pci-E Qlogic 4gb HBA
Assorted Hard Drives
- Seagate 750gb (Unused)
- Western Digital 3Tb Drive (Currently In Primary Computer)
- Few others of smaller sizes.

Right now I have ESXI running with A DNS server, VPN server and a few assorted test OS's. Nothing Heavy. I would like to consolidate the above into Two machines.

Now what I am wondering is, if I Link ESXI with a Machine running Openfiler, as that is one of the few free systems that can be a FC Target, can I then pass the FB HBA through to Windows Home Server running Drive Bender. Thus getting the 4Gb connection to the drives, limited only by drive speed. Then Pool those drives together in WHS for ISCSI and NAS use. Further can I then use Starwind to present Slices of that Pool to ESXI as space for VM's. Would I still get a high performance level or is that too much overhead?

The other question here, more related to Drive Bender, how would it handle duplication on the ISCSI Targets? Most likely I will set those to Thin Provisioning as well.

I had thought to get a RAID Card, SAS Expander or something similar to directly link the storage but I cannot afford that right now. In addition to the above I will be using a hot swap drive or 2 for backup, even if I have to get another drive. But that can wait for a bit until I get this sorted out.

Thoughts? Comments? Am I crazy? Better Ideas?
 
openfiler is not a good choice for vmware unless you use nfs

reason is iscsi implementation with openfiler kinda broken and openfiler people require you to upgrade to a paid version that uses commercial scst target where reservations works so be aware of that fact

with starwind you'd better spawn it locally in vas style during vmworld 2014 they had rolled out a version that does full ha mode on two nodes free of charge

that would be faster compared to routing all i/o over etherent
 
Let me clarify. The connection to Openfiler will be through the Fiber 4gb HBA link to ESXI. That HBA will be passed wholesale to WHS 2011 which will be running Drive Bender to pool the drives and Starwind to Offer the ISCSI Targets. Ideally the onl Physical Ethernet traffic will be when an external non VM Client calls on NAS or ISCSI storage from the WHS VM.

The only purpose to Openfiler here will be to offer the Fiber Target for the RAW drives.

What I am trying to understand is, will it work this way. Can I Link ESXI to the ISCSI Target running on the WHS VM. And then can I have the ISCSI Virtual drives hosted on the Drive Bender Pool or should I separate out Raw Disks as the WHS ISCSI Target for the ESXI.

I am just not sure what kind of performance hit this will cause. As I will be linking to the storage from ESXI through the VM Virtual Switch Ethernet Connection to WHS and Starwind which then Read\writes over the fiber HBA to the actual drives.

That is good info to know about ISCSI and Openfiler, did not know that.

What do you mean about Vas Style? Have not heard that term before.
 
While this *should work* :)

It seems like your adding so many single points of failure, and well, you will have datacorruption as a result, it won't be pretty if something fails.

I would go for something simpler, seems two layers below vmware to get to disks, is a lot, first windows, then openfiler, and depending on openfiler system, fc link, and the windows vm to all not crash, or accidental cable pull.
 
That is concerning me. The biggest reason I was trying to do it this way is because I have multiple different sized disks, so using Openfiler for RAID is not practical. If I had a SAS Expander or another DAS on the server I would of used that, but as it stands I cannot afford that.

So to get the performance that I want, and since I already have the hardware, I am trying to use the 4gb Fiber cards. Unfortunately, Openfiler is the only thing that will support FC Target. Otherwise I would use a windows platform with Drive Bender and Starwinds directly installed on it.

I guess I could just JBOD them all together into one on Openfiler, however this does not give me the selective Duplication the Drive Bender offers.

Any Ideas? Alternate methods?
 
So I agree that it "should work" but it sounds complicated with a lot of points of failure like patrickdk said.

I do not know much about Openfiler just that I have not heard a lot of good things about it and I did not pick it for my NAS/SAN.

But I do know that Napp-it does do FC targets. http://www.napp-it.org/features_en.html

I am not running FC targets with my setup but I know it is possible.

I guess I am a little confused on how you want the final setup to look like. Would the HP N40L Microserver turn into the filer? And you would run the WHS in a VM on the HP DL360?
 
well, napp-it doesn't support fc, but using illumos os with napp-it does, as comstar supports fc targets. I have that setup in production, and it works well (till the fc card freaks out, had that happen over the weekend).

I did use openfiler once, and it's issues totally made me upset and never want to use it again. If it locates a disk without a mbr, it will *format* it for you, even if you had already formatted it without an mbr. Hopefully that is fixed.
 
Never heard of Napp-It before., will check it out.

The HP Microserver will most likely be retired. It does not have the drive space or CPU capability to do much anymore. I will be putting WHS on a VM Image.

Ideally, what I will have in the end is the ESXI server and one Lower power SAN. This would consolidate WHS and my Win7 HTPC onto VM's.

So the end goal is to have that storage pool offered to WHS for Drive Pooling\NAS and a ISCSI Target for the ESXI box.

Biggest issue is my odd size drives, otherwise I could stick them in a RAID or ZFS config and not worry about the pooling. HDD prices have not really come down either.

I am just not sure what other options I have here. Really if the could RAID my drives then I would have no need of Drive Bender and just offer up One big pool. However that still leaves me having to chose between the Fiber to ESXI for VM Storage or Fiber passes through to WHS for the drive pool. Either way, the other option would have to use the slower ISCSI Target over Ethernet.

Looking at Napp-It now. Any other options? Or should I just break down and start saving for a SAS Expander or RAID Card and more Hard Drives.
 
I apologize, I know better than that. You are correct it is the OS that supports the FC and then Napp-it is a front-end (GUI) for the it. I am using OmniOS with the Napp-it appliance and have got compliance with my wording.

I know _Gea added snapraid support to Napp-it a while back which would support drive pooling of different size disks from what I can tell. It keeps files all on my size so it looks to be best for media that doesn't change much.

I hope I have helped and not put my foot in my mouth again. :eek:
 
I will have to check into that. SnapRaid could actually work for my purposes.

I just got a lead on a Cisco C3750G cheap, so I might actually be able to use Link Aggregation (802.3ad). Which will give me more options to work with. My server had 2 on-board nics and a 4 port Pci-x Gigabit adapter.

Any idea on how to put this together with that as an option? Might have to scrounge some dual or a quad card for the SAN but it is doable.

Supposed I could split the access, Fiber for NAS or ESXI VM's and ISCSI over Bonded nic's for the other... Thoughts?
 
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