Home Lab Hyper-V SAN Setup Advice

[superaz300]

Good evening Folks,

 

Really after some advice and guidance.

 

First of all, I am not a SAN expert. This is why I have decided to setup a home lab to teach myself some bits, also so I can run some virtual machines of my own. I was kindly donated the following kit from work, it is knocking on now, it's from 2011 but I think it will be okay? I have the following equipment for this project.

 

2 x Dell Poweredge R410. 2 x Intel Xeon E5620 2.40Ghz, 32GB RAM, 2 Onboard NIC's, and 1 additional quad NIC Card. This gives me 6 NICS per server.

1 x Dell Powervault MD3200i, 12 x 1TB 7.2K SAS drives and 2 SAN Controllers giving me 8 iSCSI ports.

2 x HP ProCurve 1800-24g Gigabit Switches.

 

Okay, so first of all, starting with the hosts. They are nice, a bit disappointed with the amount of NIC's it has and sadly I can't change that, so I have 6 to play with. Now the SAN, debating weather to put it into RAID 5 or RAID 10, I don't really know what is best for a SAN?

 

Virtual drives on the SAN, would you guys just create 1 massive VD and assign it to 1 LUN, or split it up?

 

I don't know if the switches I have will handle iSCSI traffic, them switches will be used for the iSCSI network only. They do support Jumbo Frames, as well as Flow Control. However , again out of my depth, but I have read something abut switch buffer sizes when it comes to switches, and these are cheap and nasty. But, they are all I have.

 

Would I be better going DAS or using the switches? I could always upgrade the switches at a later date to get some refurbished iSCSI switches, but for now they have to stay.

 

Can someone please explain to me how I should configure the networking.. I was planning to use the quad NIC in each host just for iSCSI, and then the 2 onboard NICs for VM traffic. I don't understand when I have read on forums people saying each switch needs its own subnet, and so does the iSCSI NIC's.

 

Can someone give me an example of how to connect all 8 NICS from the SAN, into what ports on what switch, and then from the switches to my hosts?

 

Just in case this is relevant, my internal subnet runs across multiple VLANS.

 

VLAN 10: Management - 10.0.10.0/24

VLAN 20 Servers - 10.0.10.0/24

Then a few others for locations etc, overkill but I did this when I was teaching myself VLANS and routing. I believe the iSCSI network will need to be different to this subnnet schema completely?

 

I am excited, this project is maybe overkill for home, but the only way I learn is hands on. Sorry if some questions seem silly, but hey we all start from some were.

 

I will look forward to the responses.

 

Best regards

James

[MS2011]

Good evening Folks,

 

Really after some advice and guidance.

 

First of all, I am not a SAN expert. This is why I have decided to setup a home lab to teach myself some bits, also so I can run some virtual machines of my own. I was kindly donated the following kit from work, it is knocking on now, it's from 2011 but I think it will be okay? I have the following equipment for this project.

 

2 x Dell Poweredge R410. 2 x Intel Xeon E5620 2.40Ghz, 32GB RAM, 2 Onboard NIC's, and 1 additional quad NIC Card. This gives me 6 NICS per server.

1 x Dell Powervault MD3200i, 12 x 1TB 7.2K SAS drives and 2 SAN Controllers giving me 8 iSCSI ports.

2 x HP ProCurve 1800-24g Gigabit Switches.

 

Okay, so first of all, starting with the hosts. They are nice, a bit disappointed with the amount of NIC's it has and sadly I can't change that, so I have 6 to play with. Now the SAN, debating weather to put it into RAID 5 or RAID 10, I don't really know what is best for a SAN?

 

Virtual drives on the SAN, would you guys just create 1 massive VD and assign it to 1 LUN, or split it up?

 

I don't know if the switches I have will handle iSCSI traffic, them switches will be used for the iSCSI network only. They do support Jumbo Frames, as well as Flow Control. However , again out of my depth, but I have read something abut switch buffer sizes when it comes to switches, and these are cheap and nasty. But, they are all I have.

 

Would I be better going DAS or using the switches? I could always upgrade the switches at a later date to get some refurbished iSCSI switches, but for now they have to stay.

 

Can someone please explain to me how I should configure the networking.. I was planning to use the quad NIC in each host just for iSCSI, and then the 2 onboard NICs for VM traffic. I don't understand when I have read on forums people saying each switch needs its own subnet, and so does the iSCSI NIC's.

 

Can someone give me an example of how to connect all 8 NICS from the SAN, into what ports on what switch, and then from the switches to my hosts?

 

Just in case this is relevant, my internal subnet runs across multiple VLANS.

 

VLAN 10: Management - 10.0.10.0/24

VLAN 20 Servers - 10.0.10.0/24

Then a few others for locations etc, overkill but I did this when I was teaching myself VLANS and routing. I believe the iSCSI network will need to be different to this subnnet schema completely?

 

I am excited, this project is maybe overkill for home, but the only way I learn is hands on. Sorry if some questions seem silly, but hey we all start from some were.

 

I will look forward to the responses.

 

Best regards

James

 

Your project definitely overkill for home. I have similar kit running Vmware. I created two Luns and two dedicated switches for isscsi.

[superaz300]

Thank you for your reply.

 

Yes, it is overkill but it was free. May I ask what switches you have for iSCSI?

 

Cheers

James

 

Your project definitely overkill for home. I have similar kit running Vmware. I created two Luns and two dedicated switches for isscsi.

[superaz300]

**BUMP**

Just pushing this back out there, can anyone give me any pointers?

 

Best regards

James

[geohanson]

I’m certainly no expert when it comes to SANs or VMWare, but I’d stick with RAID 10 - you’ll loose capacity, 12 x 1TB / 2 = Approx 6TB in RAID 10 vs 12 x 1TB - 1 = Approx 11TB in RAID 5, but gain read and write performance, and reliability.

 

We’ve currently got HP 2510 switches doing SAN switching only. All other server connections are to our core switch.

I don’t think there’s anything stopping you using the same switch for iSCSI and VM traffic, just use VLANS/Subnets to separate the traffic.

 

VM Traffic could go on VLAN20 10.0.10.0/24.

SAN traffic would either then go on separate switches or on a new VLAN/Subnet on the same switches.

 

I’m guessing the SAN also has some management ports - these would go onto your management network so you can actually login to the SAN to manage it.

 

If you’re aggregating iSCSI, don’t use LACP or Teaming but use MPIO.

 

Try and spread out connections over the Onboard/PCI NICS rather than having all the iSCSI connections just on the PCI Card, and the VM connections just on the Onboard NICS.

Have one VM Traffic connection on the Onboard NIC, and one on the PCI card, then one iSCSI on the Onboard NIC and the others on the PCI card.

 

This way, should either the PCI card, or the Onboard controller fail you won’t completely lose connections.

 

Same goes with connections from the SAN to the switches. SAN controller 1 port 1 to switch 1, controller 1 port 2 to switch 2, controller 2 port 1 to switch 1, controller 2 port 2 to switch 2.

Again this is to remove any single point of failure.

 

Hope thats useful, but I’m no expert on SANs or VMWare!

[Davit2005]

Thank you for your reply.

 

Yes, it is overkill but it was free. May I ask what switches you have for iSCSI?

 

Cheers

James

 

HP 1800 switches are real old, ideally they'd support Jumbo Frames I cannot remember. Keep the iSCSI traffic on seperate vlans and seperate NICs as you have aluded to which you can do on the 1800s through the GUI.

 

I've not had much experience with Hyper-V and iSCSI to be honest but much more on VMWare and iSCSI but this was 7-8 years ago now. I use NFS myself with VMWare now as I have 10Gb networking and just use active failover adapters for the NFS connections and load balancing for the VM's.

 

Great setup for home and if it was free all the better, a lot of the problem with the education environment is the scope for training time and/or budget is near zero when it comes to IT support roles. Even in the corporate envinronment it is sometimes difficult.

[MS2011]

HP 1800 switches are real old, ideally they'd support Jumbo Frames I cannot remember. Keep the iSCSI traffic on seperate vlans and seperate NICs as you have aluded to which you can do on the 1800s through the GUI.

 

I've not had much experience with Hyper-V and iSCSI to be honest but much more on VMWare and iSCSI but this was 7-8 years ago now. I use NFS myself with VMWare now as I have 10Gb networking and just use active failover adapters for the NFS connections and load balancing for the VM's.

 

Great setup for home and if it was free all the better, a lot of the problem with the education environment is the scope for training time and/or budget is near zero when it comes to IT support roles. Even in the corporate envinronment it is sometimes difficult.

 

We are still iscsi and Vmware and want to move 10Gb and NFS.

 

What’s your setup ?

[Davit2005]

We are still iscsi and Vmware and want to move 10Gb and NFS.

 

What’s your setup ?

 

For my home network I have about 4 VMWare servers, 2 for lab and 2 for production.

 

Each server as a dual X520-DA2 which are split between 2 Ubiquiti ES-16-XGs, I use a Synology NAS for NFS loaded with decent SSDs. Soon to change this a bit though and use a much more cutdown network for production at home. Probably a few Raspberry Pi's running DHCP, DNS, NTP, Radius, LDAP etc. Still going to be way over kill but want to widen my knowledge in Linux a bit more and save a bit of elec power :-) .

[MS2011]

For my home network I have about 4 VMWare servers, 2 for lab and 2 for production.

 

Each server as a dual X520-DA2 which are split between 2 Ubiquiti ES-16-XGs, I use a Synology NAS for NFS loaded with decent SSDs. Soon to change this a bit though and use a much more cutdown network for production at home. Probably a few Raspberry Pi's running DHCP, DNS, NTP, Radius, LDAP etc. Still going to be way over kill but want to widen my knowledge in Linux a bit more and save a bit of elec power :-) .

 

[emoji106]

[superaz300]

Hi Guys,

 

I could really do with some help with my subnets for iSCSI. I have decided to scrap the switches for now and connect everything direct because I am getting major performance issues, I am just not getting any decent speeds to my SAN what so ever, maximum I am getting is about 237MB when copying something to the SAN, I would of thought over a 4GB connection I would get more, especially in RAID 10 SAS Disks, or am I over expecting and is this right?

 

Anyways, I have ripped out everything, and this is how its configured physically:

 

SAN CONTROLLER 0 port 0 -> Server 1 NIC 1 port 1

SAN CONTROLLER 0 port 1 -> Server 2 NIC 1 port 3

SAN CONTROLLER 0 port 2 -> Server 1 NIC 1 port 1

SAN CONTROLLER 0 port 3 -> Server 2 NIC 1 port 3

 

SAN CONTROLLER 1 port 0 -> Server 1 NIC 2 port 2

SAN CONTROLLER 1 port 1 -> Server 2 NIC 2 port 4

SAN CONTROLLER 1 port 2 -> Server 1 NIC 2 port 2

SAN CONTROLLER 1 port 3 -> Server 2 NIC 2 port 4

 

I hope this makes sense? I have a quad NIC card in each host dedicated for iSCSI. How can I configure the IP addressing for the SAN and the HOSTS, been able to take advantage of MPIO and get maximum performance?

 

Best regards

James

[superaz300]

**BUMP**

Anyone? Sorry if I have worded this thread badly, trying to make it as clear as possible.

[PotNoodleTech]

236mb/s seems about right for non SSDs.

 

Don't forget, Raid 10 makes reading from the array faster but it doesnt make writing to the array any faster.

 

I moved away from Iscsi in the end as frankly it is an overcomplicated way of getting worse perfromance and reliability (than SAS or DAS).