Lab - SAN options

Update: Going to wait and see what the next few months brings for new products. Hesitant to purchase the Iomega units as they are several years old now.

I had a sobering thought this afternoon. My entire VMware lab is basing iSCSI SAN usage off of our Synology DS410j. The same NAS that houses all of our pictures, data, etc. If my lab kills it, my wife kills me. (and frankly I'd be super-upset as well) We do have backups (that I need to test) done to an external, but it would be a giant pain if it broke.

Thus, I consider my options.

Dedicated Openfiler box (~$1800)
This would be a stand alone machine running the latest version of Openfiler. Dual RAID cards with 8 spindles each, two dual NICs for MPIO to two locations, thus mimicking two SANs.

Pro: Does MPIO, high spindle count.
Con: Cannot test SAN replication. Power hippo.

Two NAS that support iSCSI (~$2200)
Basically buy two DS411+ and fill with 1TB or 2TB drives.

Pro: Simple to configure/maintain. Can do synchronization between units.
Con: Only four spindles. Only one NIC (no MPIO). Relatively high cost per unit ($690 per bare chassis).

ESX host running Openfiler VM (~$2200)
Basically an ESX host with a LOT of local storage (dual RAID arrays, 16 spindles).

Pro: VM appliance. Able to run other VMs on same machine.
Con: More complex to maintain. Less ports usable for ESX purposes as they are tied to Openfiler VM. More layers so more latency.


All in all, pricy, and none of them really give me what I'm looking for.

However, there is one more option that I've been avoiding:

NAS Option #2 (~$1300)
IOmega IX4-200d (4x1TB). A lot of the VM bloggers use these, so maybe it's wise to just jump on board. VMware HCL is no small thing either. I would have liked some sort of MPIO option. According to the manual, it does a limited version of MPIO, so maybe this is the best way.

Pro: On the VMware HCL. Dual NICs. 4x1TB is plenty of space.
Con: Bad support (many people not happy). Cannot buy diskless.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning through failure - a keyboard creation journey

Image
tl;dr Built a custom keyboard cuz I have weirdo nerve pain issues.   Learned a lot cuz I failed a lot.   Maybe 'do it right the first time' is a bad frame of mind.   The keyboard ended up being kinda nifty.   It has lights, and a trackball, and QMK, and it helps my issues.   \o/ ( tl;dr is internet lingo that means, too long; didn't read ) Pain as a key ingredient An old proverb says, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and that is how this story begins. Over the last few years, age or stress or something has caught up with me and I developed the need to change my human-to-computer interface.  Mousing changed to trackballing.  The traditional keyboard was swapped out for an ergonomic, and then split keyboard.  Complicated multi-finger-and-hand key combinations were replaced by single keypress macros.  And yet more was still needed. It's often said that change only happens with pain - indeed, the organizations many...
Read more

Learning Opportunities - Watching/listening list

Over the last year I've spent a lot of time learning (thank you, long commute & lunch hours).  Many topics ranging from Chef to DevOps to architecture concepts to management concepts and everything in between.  Why have I done this? DevOps Demystified with Ben Rockwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY DevOps at ancestry.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF5ya0q53kk Those two presentations were key in sending me down this road.  First, and most important, was Mr. Rockwood's explanation as to the real 'why', and the point behind DevOps from an operational perspective.  Second, and no less important but for a different reason, the continuous delivery system at ancestry.com really made it real to me because they are a 'Windows shop'.  So much of what I'd been reading about Chef/config mgmt. relied on amazing tools (see the error there?) only available to the Linux world.  Suddenly here's this guy telling me that it's possible...
Read more

DFSR - eventid 4312 - replication just won't work

This warning isn't documented that well on the googles, so here's some google fodder: You are trying to set up replication for a DFS folder (no existing replication) Source server is 2008R2, 'branch office' server is 2012R2 (I'm moving all our infra to 2012R2) You have no issues getting replication configured You see the DFSR folders get created on the other end, but nothing stages Finally you get EventID 4312: The DFS Replication service failed to get folder information when walking the file system on a journal wrap or loss recovery due to repeated sharing violations encountered on a folder. The service cannot replicate the folder and files in that folder until the sharing violation is resolved.    Additional Information:  Folder: F:\Users$\user.name\Desktop\Random Folder Name\  Replicated Folder Root: F:\Users$  File ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}-v0  Replicated Folder Name: Users  Replicated Folder ID: 33F0449D...
Read more