You can use VMware vSphere without a shared storage device, but it limits the amount of advanced features that you can use with it. Certain features in vSphere require that a virtual machine (VM) reside on a shared storage device that is accessible by multiple hosts concurrently. These features include high availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Fault Tolerance (FT) and VMotion, which provide high/continuous availability as well as workload load balancing and live migration of virtual machines. For some storage administrators, these features may only be nice to have, but they are also essential for many IT environments that cannot afford to have VMs down for an extended amount of time.
A few years ago, VMware shared storage typically meant using a Fibre Channel (FC) SAN, which was expensive, required specialized equipment and was complicated to manage. In recent years, other shared storage options that utilize standard network components to connect to storage devices have become popular and make for affordable, easy-to-use shared storage solutions. The protocols used for this are iSCSI and NFS, both of which are natively supported in vSphere. The performance of NFS and iSCSI are similar, but both can vary depending on a variety of factors including the data storage device characteristics, network speed/latency and host server resources. Since both protocols use software built into vSphere to manage the storage connections over the network there is some minimal CPU resource usage on the host server as a result.
Read the full article at searchsmbstorage.com…
In the last week I’ve gotten some new storage devices, both at work and at home. Unfortunately I’ve experienced problems with both and its not been as fun of a week as I would of liked. The new work storage device is a HP MSA-2312i which is the iSCSI version of their Modular Storage Array line.
The new home storage device is an Iomega ix4-200d 4TB which is a relatively low cost network storage device that supports iSCSI & NFS and much more.
The MSA problems have all been firmware related, basically it kept getting stuck in a firmware upgrade loop, if you own one or plan on buying one I would say don’t upgrade the firmware unless you have a reason to and if you do make sure you schedule downtime. I’ll be sharing some tips for upgrading the firmware on that unit later on.
The Iomega problems are from a flaky hard drive presumably, not long after I plugged the unit in and started configuring it I received the message that drive 3 was missing. After talking to support and rebuilding the RAID group the problem briefly went away and then came right back. They graciously waived the $25 replacement fee (it’s brand new, they better!) and refused to expedite the shipping unless I paid $40 (again, its brand new, you would think they would want to make a new customer happy). Having a flaky drive in a brand new unit doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in storing critical data on the device so I’ll have to see how it goes once the drive is replaced.
So look forward to some upcoming posts on using and configuring both devices. The MSA will be used as part of a Domino virtualization project and I’ll be doing performance testing on it in various configurations. The Iomega I’ll be using with VMware Workstation 7 on my home computer as both iSCSI & NFS datastores.
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