On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Jason <wheelz...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I've been looking to build my own cheap SAN to explore HA scenarios with > VMware hosts, though not for a production environment. I'm new to > opensolaris but I am familiar with other clustered HA systems. The features > of ZFS seem like they would fit right in with attempting to build an HA > storage platform for VMware hosts on inexpensive hardware. > > Here is what I am thinking. I want to have at least two clustered nodes > (may be virtual running off the local storage of the VMware host) that act > as the front end of the SAN. These will not have any real storage > themselves, but will be initiators for backend computers with the actual > disks in them. I want to be able to add and remove/replace at will so I > figure the backends will just be fairly dumb iSCSI targets that just present > each disk. That way the front ends are close to the hardware for zfs to > work best but would not limit a raid set to the capacity of a single > enclosure. > > I'd like to present a RAIDZ2 array as a block device to VMware, how would > that work? Could that then be clustered so the iSCSI target is HA? Am I > completely off base or is there an easier way? My goal is to be able to > kill any one box (or multiple) and still keep the storage available for > VMware, but still get a better total storage to usable ratio than just a > plain mirror (2:1). I also want to be able to add and remove storage > dynamically. You know, champagne on a beer budget. :) > > Any particular reason you want to present block storage to VMware? It works as well, if not better over NFS, and saves a LOT of headaches. --Tim
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