SAN Solution

[penfold_99]

HI All,

I was wondering if it would be possible for the collective hiv mind of edugeek to help us out with a possible implementation of a san.

Has anyone implemented a san in there school?

We looking to link the san to all our servers and ibm blade centre this will be done via fibre channel card and a fibre switch.

What is the best solution for running the servers all off the san or having a local disk ruuning the os and mount the san windows/linux etc?

Does any one have a picture so i can visualise how everything fit together?

Thanks for your help in advance

[zag]

Sounds a bit overkill for a school, just out of interest, what are you trying to improve?

[penfold_99]

We're trying to do a number of things

consolidate data as were nearing 3 tb of stuff.
virtualisation so the images need run off the san.

[RobFuller]

Will you want a full blown Fibre Attached SCSI or iSCSI?

Are you going to be running software like VMware’s ESX, which will give you the most benefits from centralised storage?

Also will you want more than one SAN replicated perhaps in a different location on site to provide redundancy?

[penfold_99]

Will you want a full blown Fibre Attached SCSI or iSCSI?

Are you going to be running software like VMware’s ESX, which will give you the most benefits from centralised storage?

Also will you want more than one SAN replicated perhaps in a different location on site to provide redundancy?

Full blown Fibre attached SCSI.

We will be running KVM Virtualisation as red hat has killed support for Xen adn the bonus it's free.

We will need a sas/sata split as we will use sata for storage and sas to run the vm images off.

We will be backing up the new san to our old nas

[bossman]

@penfold_99:
I would not go down the route of fibre channels as this is way too expensive at the moment.
We are looking at the Hitachi SMS100 which is just a sealed unit and carries a 5 year guarantee.
This is connected to 2 Gig managed switches for failover via cat6 and all servers are connected to these switches with 2 connections using cat6 cabling.
Throughput is 4Gbps and the unit will give us 6.75Tb using raid 6 will give us 6.75Tb formatted space over 12 sata discs to do what we want with.

All this for approx 6K. We will be moving forward with this over the next few months.
hope this has helped.

Bossman

[RobFuller]

Why use full blown Fibre SCSI when only using SATA drives, you would really want SAS 10K or higher to benefit.
Perhaps iSCSI over fibre would be better; like jinnantonnix said even cooper is an option to start with.

Would defiantly have your guest os booting from the SAN but your hosts having their own disks to boot from. ESX3i now integrates onto a chip so you don’t even need HD anymore.
Make sure you plan how many machines you’re going to virtualizes and what resources they need, make sure you have enough ram in your hosts then make sure you have plenty spare capacity as you will us it and the price does start climbing when you ask for the bigger modules.

[TronXP]

I have an IBM fibre channel SAN connected to IBM servers (not blade ) we are running Novell Netware 6.5 + Cluster services. I can try to answer some questions if you would like. Just PM me

[ICTNUT]

I have just gone for an iSCSI SAN with the following:

HP Blades x 3 with 2 x Intel Quad Cores, 12Gb Ram, 2 x 73Gb SAS in a c3000 Chasis

HP MS2000i 12 disk array (6 SAS and 6 SATA) 6.3Tb dual controllers

VMWare ESX Server

All warranties with 4 hour same day on site and all licenses for the next 3 years.

Total Cost: £21k

Fibre Channel equivalent: £36k <-- Far to much money for a school and no real performance gain in a school environment over iSCSI

We will be virtualising 14 servers and keeping just the 2 DC's and the Exchange server as physical servers.

Will be using our 2 old NAS servers (1TB Each) for backups and snapshots at the other end of the school as part of an amended DR stratergy.

[penfold_99]

The reason for going fibre to begin with is we are able to afford it.

We're looking to maximise speed as we will be using it heavily for virtualisation and citirix.

With fibre it will be completely separate from our network.

[ICTNUT]

@penfold_99: Yes I agree fibre is good in that sense however I plan to replicate the seperate network the fibre can provide via the use of VLANs which should result in the same.

[bossman]

Penfold_99:
Did look at EMCs CX3 SANs which used fibre channel disks front end and sata 10k disks backend. Utilizing VMware ESX it came to approx 45k which we cannot afford at this moment but need to implement a storage solution this year hence have gone for a cheaper solution which will cover us for the next 5 years which will lead nicely to BSF and it will no longer be my problem.

[penfold_99]

We're currently looking at the ibm ds3400 with 4 fibre cards and 3tb split 70/30 for sata/sas and it's coming in about 6-8k.

For virtualisation we are looking at kvm as it free which will save us a hat full of money.

[dhicks]

We will be running KVM Virtualisation as red hat has killed support for Xen

Eh? Drat, that could cause me problems as I've just moved all our machines to CentOS + Xen... Any more details on the above?

--
David Hicks

[CyberNerd]

Eh? Drat, that could cause me problems as I've just moved all our machines to CentOS + Xen... Any more details on the above?

--
David Hicks

It seems quite recent news. more info here:
Red Hat adopts KVM: what happens to Xen now? | virtualization.info

Seems xen getting sold off to citrix didn't sit too well for rhel, developing a rivals product...

What happens to Xen now? What happens to the Red Hat investment on it?
The official press announcement don't say it explicitly but the choice of words lets clearly understand that Xen is the past and KVM is the future.
It's unknown if Red Hat will continue to support Xen or what will happen to those enterprise customers that adopted RHEL 5 to use the hypervisor (mostly because Xen and KVM virtual machines are incompatible).

In any case it's unlikely that Red Hat will drop Xen tomorrow: the company sits in the Xen advisory board and its support policy implies that any distribution must be supported for seven years.
Red Hat may want to spend this time convincing its customers that KVM is a better virtualization engine: Virtual Machine Manager, for example, has been already re-categorized as a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines.

in the comments: http://kraxel.fedorapeople.org/xenner/