openfiler in a vm on ESXi

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CiscoInside

Gawd
Joined
Mar 26, 2010
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546
Hey all,

I am looking at building a new iSCSI box - the one I have now is fine, running Storage Server 2008 R2 with a rocket raid and 4 drives. It does what it does, but I am looking at adding more storage since I am now playing with view.

I was thinking of building a new box, with a LSI controller or Adaptec - installing ESXi on it and running openfiler in a vm. From there I would connect my current ESXi box to the LUNs through openfiler.

Is this possible to do, and/or recommended? I would really like to build a new box and not just use it as a SAN but also have more resources available in my lab.

What do you guys think/suggest?
 
This is done quite often. There shouldn't be any issues as long as you use supported hardware, and your motherboard/CPU support VT-d.
 
Is this for personal use, if so Openfiler should be fine. If it's for production/business, you may want to consider something supported like Open-E. They charge by usable TB's of storage, not RAW, which is nice.

EDIT: I misunderstood what you're doing, yeah Openfiler in a vm should be a non-issue for data store usage.
 
That is good to know. Thanks guys.. I am running out of storage and need more resources for my vms so this should help out a lot.
 
Open-E is not better then Openfiler. Same level of technology, same badge engineering... I'd take a look at something with a real value for virtualization. Something ZFS based. Nexenta or any other ZFS wrapper clone. With a live community behing :))

MikeTrike said:
Is this for personal use, if so Openfiler should be fine. If it's for production/business, you may want to consider something supported like Open-E. They charge by usable TB's of storage, not RAW, which is nice.

EDIT: I misunderstood what you're doing, yeah Openfiler in a vm should be a non-issue for data store usage.
Click to expand...
 
I will be experimenting with different solutions.. since this is my lab I would like to learn the different setups that are out there, so all your recommendations are important. I plan on having my critcial vms on this new server so I have a local datastore, then play with the different software options for my other vms.
 
Olga-SAN said:
Open-E is not better then Openfiler. Same level of technology, same badge engineering... I'd take a look at something with a real value for virtualization. Something ZFS based. Nexenta or any other ZFS wrapper clone. With a live community behing :))
Click to expand...

I have used both Openfiler (which is buggier IMO) and Open-E (6TB) and I'm going to step out on a limb and make the claim that Open-E is better than Openfiler. Now to be fair, I have had hardware compatibility issues with Open-E before. But that's about it...
 
I use OpenFiler as a real FC Setup and i use a VM with PCI-Passthrough with an LSI1068E with direct passthrough of those drives to filer, this seemed to have the best throughput, i will mention using iSCSI with the 2.99 Verision (SCST not IET) there were complications when the iSCSI Device was setup to two Hosts or more. for some reason there is a glitch in some versions of ESX(i) that will not release the lock on it... so if your creating a VM make sure u make multiple interfaces and tie that interface to each host.

also i tried using Nexenta as a VM with the same setup for ZFS i had issues where under heavy stress loads that the host would become un-responsive for ~5 minutes and then would come back. its still uncertain why this happened but i did have 8GB and 2vCPUs allocated to that VM with the same PCI Passthrough and had worse results with that.

Personally i like openfiler, yes it has some hickups but im all about Fibre Target through SCST for my primary and i goof around with the VM version as a backup source.
 
latest on their website at the time ~ 3 months ago. when i was doing my tests.
 
Ah, yeah, I quit on nexentastor. Every once in awhile, the GUI (or some background task) would basically freeze up the box. I'm not the only one either :(
 
I have had good luck with Nexentastor (bare metal though). I have it running our NAS at work which is primarily the backup destination for images of all other machines, plus temporary network storage, NFS server and some iscsi volumes for testing various other stuff. I have found the gui to be clunky for certain, but I've gotten somewhat used to it. Very stable too. It gets used heavily every day. Last system boot was over 6 and half months ago (on purpose) and was running for months before that too without issue.

Doing it again though I would spend some more time with nexentacore, oi, or se11 + napp it. There are some nice options there not doable with the free nexentastor.
 
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