Need to build ESX environment across multiple physical servers.

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takeawaydave

Member
Aug 20, 2013
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Inherited 7 racked IBM x series servers. For testing purposes I would like to setup a ESX VSphere environment.
Each server has 2 x 136GB disks, 4 x Xeon 7400 Series Processors and 16 GB RAM.
Ideally I would like to create a single redundant disk array across some of the servers and disks and then use the rest of the hosts as ESX servers.
Any suggestions how this can be achieved ?
 

dba

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Feb 20, 2012
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San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA

takeawaydave

Member
Aug 20, 2013
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Yes its a test environment as opposed to testing. We're literally hanging on to the old hardware so we get to test what we need to test... Thanks for the pointer to VMWare Virtual SAN. Can Nexenta achieve the same kind of result ?
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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If you use several ESXi servers with one shared SAN/NAS or datastore with whatever solution, you have a single point of failure. On problems there your whole system is offline.

You should use at least two ESXi servers and two shared storage sytems. You can build four independent systems for these functions and connect them with a highspeed redundant cabled network

You can also follwow my All-In-One Idea wheryou virtualize the SAN like other VMs. This requires hardware pass-through of the storage part to offer a comparable performance like the other option with dedicated SAN boxes.

With All-In-One you can build completely independent boxes that include all SAN features like performance, multi-protocol access, snapshottings, data security or SAN replication.

I wrote a mini Howto about:
http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/all-in-one.pdf

If you like to use NexentaStor instead of OmniOS or OI, the way is the same