Is it possible to have an OmniOS + napp-it box be a Fiber Channel target?

[scullsold]

Bitly. The power of the link.

 

[m4r1k]

Are you planning to buy Brocade FC switch as well? I’m asking cause at that point 40Gbps Ethernet on DAC cables would be way cheaper

 

[gea]

OmniOS is an Opensource Solaris fork with the Solaris Comstar framework for FC/iSCSI.
You can follow Configuring Fibre Channel Devices With COMSTAR - Oracle Solaris Administration: Devices and File Systems

From ESXi you can either access NFS shares on ZFS to put VMs onto (what I do and prefer) or you can create zvols (a ZFS filesystem that is treated as a blockdevice like a disk) and share them via Comstar.

Unlike an NFS share that can be accessed simultaniously by multiple clients, a FC/iSCSI target is mouted from ESXi like a local disk what means that you must disconnect prior a connect from another ESXi.

 

[whitey]

Unlike an NFS share that can be accessed simultaniously by multiple clients, a FC/iSCSI target is mouted from ESXi like a local disk what means that you must disconnect prior a connect from another ESXi.

Not quite sure I fully agree if you are saying iSCSI/FC target can ONLY be mounted to one ESXi host at a time, VMFS will make it a cluster/shared volume and be accessible simultaneously to all hosts in vSphere cluster then you can use vMotion/svMotion granted you make the target accessible via comstart stack to multiple hosts in the cluster. I also DO prefer to use NFS though. Just simpler and quite performant/near lockstep w/ iSCSI/FC long as you make it over 10G ethernet fabric or above.

 

[gea]

Yes, but the point is that there is no support for concurrent access within FC/iSCSI targets like it is in NFS/SMB. You need an additional cluster software layer that controls access.

 

[whitey]

True, but he's specifically asking about ESXi here so he would have VMFS clustered filesystem access if setting up a Comstar FC target but I digress, we each get 1/2 a point for correctness/validity :-D