This is really interesting all these ideas and thoughts, so many thanks again! Geez you guys are awesome and so helpful.
Right, I'm going to ignore jumbo frames for now!
Thats an interesting thought! I never thought to do crossover cables for BOTH hosts. Can that work?? ie:
SAN - 2 x quad NICs - lets call it Quad-A and Quad-B
Server1 - quad NIC run crossover cables to Quad-A
Server2 - quad NIC run crossover cables to Quad-B
Will this setup work ok with iSCSI/MPIO/Round Robin and ESXi? Also will HA/DRS work? Will the shared storage be ok with this kind of setup? I won't see duplicate drives/datastores etc?
I'm only concerned with getting two nodes up and running right now. ;-)
My two new Supermicro servers have dual Intel 10Gb NICs onboard but the prices for a dual port 10Gb NIC for my SAN server make me cringe when I look at the prices online...
Right, I'm going to ignore jumbo frames for now!
Unfortunately I live in an apartment so my gear simply has to be quiet/practical/fanless (if possible). It all lives in my lounge! I could ask our comms guys at work to borrow a switch but the chances of them letting my take it home are slim!*I* can't answer that, my home lab is in a full rack in the basement and very much full of fans. Someone else here could answer that better. I might suggest getting another switch, even if just a loaner, to confirm the issue before you worry about anything else. Get one with fans and noise and confirm it all works fine. THEN see what you can get to minimize the noise. I'm not sure how well they work, but something like the Quanta L4BM or IBM Blade G8000's are around $100 or so. They'd be a good place to try, but see what work or other's in a local user group might have that you could try for a weekend. It would validate your configs are correct and that it's the hardware.
Its not just ATTO benchamrks, storage vMotion is sloooooooow. I'm going to be investing hours of my time using this lab every week so I don't want to be twiddling my thumbs while something vMotions, clones or whatver. The file copy isn't that serious but doing VMware "stuff" is. I've had slow VMware storage before at home and it drove me nuts with all the time you waste, thats why I want to get it right this time ;-)What "problems"? First, don't get hung up on Atto throughput benchmarks. If you want IOPS, then focus on that. You don't CARE (or shouldn't) how long it takes a file to copy inside the VM. You care how long it takes to clone the VM so you can try something, how long svMotion takes, how long snapshot commits take, etc. That's all generally going to be IOPS based. So don't go chasing mythical numbers if they don't help your end goal. Which, for most home labs is "how much productive time can I get out of this in an evening" or "how many times can I try this over and over again in a night, to learn the most, end to end".
I've only ever used FC on NetApp's, and have no idea what home built SAN solutions there are available like StarWind. It's going to be a lot less, especially in the Windows world, as most people just go ISCSI. More to that point, if you're going to get FC cards and such, why not just go point to point with 10GbE and still stay ISCSI but switchless? In either case you're likely going to want 4 dual port cards - 1 for each host to have 2 ports and 2 for the "SAN" so that it can actually GIVE 2x10GbE to each host. Will set you back a little more than FC, but now you're future ready to drop in 10GbE switches and expand. FC experience is "good" but it's a dying art.
Actually in light of the above comment, and how your crossover solution worked - you could just pick up another NC364T for the "SAN" and just do that. That's certainly another way to do it. It starts falling down (with any solution) as soon as you want to start having a 3rd node or have a second SAN node for HA, etc.
Thats an interesting thought! I never thought to do crossover cables for BOTH hosts. Can that work?? ie:
SAN - 2 x quad NICs - lets call it Quad-A and Quad-B
Server1 - quad NIC run crossover cables to Quad-A
Server2 - quad NIC run crossover cables to Quad-B
Will this setup work ok with iSCSI/MPIO/Round Robin and ESXi? Also will HA/DRS work? Will the shared storage be ok with this kind of setup? I won't see duplicate drives/datastores etc?
I'm only concerned with getting two nodes up and running right now. ;-)
My two new Supermicro servers have dual Intel 10Gb NICs onboard but the prices for a dual port 10Gb NIC for my SAN server make me cringe when I look at the prices online...