VMware ESX; cheaper datastor for archived guests?

[hotcrandel]

Greetings.

I think this is a pretty straight forward question.

I have three servers in a VMware ESX 5.0 cluster. Each server is presented say, a dozen different datastore's of an HP Lefthand SAN product over iSCSI.

Each server can access each datastore and different VM's on the same datastore can be running on different servers. Standard stuff.

As I understand it the SAN can deal with multiple connections from different sources allowing RW access to the iSCSI datastore

My question is if I build a whitebox iSCSI NAS, and attach it to all the servers, can all three members of the cluster RW simultaneously to say, a freeNAS or nexentastor datastor over iSCSI?

It sounds appealing to migrate my archived VM's off of my production storage, and even better to use ZFS send to back this stuff up somewhere else.

 

[peanuthead]

I don't see why not. iSCSI is iSCSI. You could migrate the VMs using SvMotion if you have the licensing for it, etc. You could also purchase a lower end Synology or something that you know is supposed and not worry about building one barring that you don't already own the whitebox hardware.

 

[moto316]

Yes you can.

 

[ND40oz]

I'd probably just buy a QNAP or Synology that's VMware certified and use that instead of whiteboxing it.

 

[peanuthead]

If they are just VMs that need to be archived then I understand moving them to a different "storage level". If you still need to maintain them then make sure they are getting backed up, too regardless of storage level location. Nothing replaces a good backup. (Always good to be reminded.)