Virtual SAN Solution for VMware vSphere 4

Virtual SAN Solution for VMware vSphere 4

As you know, for using all features of VMware vSphere 4, you need to have SAN, either iSCSI SAN or FiberChannel SAN. For some organizations providing the standard servers like HP DL380 is very expensive and SAN as well. Or for some other organizations, it is not optimize to use standard SAN, maybe they do not have server room, maybe they have all PC servers. So for all these organizations we can use Virtual SAN and Ethernet Network to run a practical SAN in your LAN.

There are solutions, but I suggest two of them.

Assume you have two server, either PC server or Rackmount server. You have sufficient storage on both of them, etc. 1 TB disk storage.  You want to run VMware vSphere and use vMotion, FT and VMHA.

You can run ESX on both servers, after that, create two "other Linux" Virtual Machine with the amount of space to install "Openfiler Virtual SAN" on that.

The first solution is to use two virtual SAN separately, name the SAN on "Host1", "vSAN1", and the second one "vSAN2" on "Host2". Configure the SAN on ESX Hosts and create VMs and use SAN storage. In this solution, make all virtual machines on Host1 use vSAN1and vice versa for Host2 and vSAN2. For critical VMs, use FT and make the secondary VM on another vSAN. For others, use VMware Data Recovery and for each virtual machine in vSAN1 and make a backup on vSAN2 and vice versa. In downtime situations of a physical sever, the FT machines change the primary VM to another host and for other VMs, just clone the latest update.

The Pros:

·         You can use 2 TB of storage.

·         It is easier to configure each SAN.

·         You can create cluster on your virtual infrastructure.

·         You can use special features of VMware vSphere.

The Cons:

·         If your VMs has changed from the last update, in downtime, they lost their information.

·         A VM in for example in Host1 and has the storage of that VM on vSAN2, is slow on read and write.

The second solution is to use a virtual SAN as primary and another one as a redundant and secondary SAN. You need to use one NIC on each physical server for SAN and use separate IPs from your LAN for them. You have one vSAN for virtual infrastructure. In this situation all the data on vSAN1 will be exist on vSAN2 at almost same time. If you have downtime on each host, the data never lose.

The Pros:

·         You can create cluster on your virtual infrastructure.

·         You can use special features of VMware vSphere.

·         Never losing data.

·         High Availability.

The Cons:

·         The complexity of configuration of two redundant vSAN.

·         You have just 1 TB of storage.

See you.
Saman Salehi