Storage Recommendations for Blade Servers

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hyltcasper

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May 1, 2020
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I can't complete the setup in my mind. There is single HP C7000 blade server with 32 CPU and 4 TB of memory. I need 30 TB usable storage space. It should be fast enough for virtualization kind of standard web servers.

HP Bl460c Gen9 only supports a pair of 2.5 Sata drives. I don't want to invest Sata SSD's, while NVME more durable and cheap. But there is no option to connect U2 or M2 disks to blades.

Another option is building a storage server. There are redundant F8 blade switches that supports 40G TCP as I know. And there are flexilom cards on blades. I already have 16 TB M2 NVME on my Dell R730, it has two 100G mellanox cards. Can I go hybrid with addition of spinning drives? Which software you recommend?

See question on reddit
 
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DavidWJohnston

Active Member
Sep 30, 2020
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Including your question here might gain a better response, but I'll try to give an answer.

Question (summarized): You have a chassis of blades and you want 30TB shared storage for hosting web servers.

Answer:

Blade servers alone are meant more for compute, the internal drives are mostly for a mirror to hold the OS (ESXi, etc) on each blade, not for the production storage workload - Of course it depends what you're doing. To host virtualized web servers and do live migration, etc, shared storage is probably the way to go.

Do you have the HPE 20/40 F8 FlexFabric cards in your chassis? If so, you could take advantage of the FCoE and accelerated iSCSI:


To serve the storage, build a server with the appropriate compatible hardware and software. Or, for a prod (money-making) workload, preferably go for a commercial solution with maintenance and support.

Edit: You could also use VMware vSAN if all your blades together have enough storage, but this can be dangerous unless you understand exactly what's happening.
 
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hyltcasper

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May 1, 2020
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Yes I have 40G network between blades and outside. I want to place the storage outside of blades. I have 8 bay Dell R630's.
 

BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
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Dear OP: You still haven't answered the most important question - Is this for production - ie - Will this setup be used to make money. If so, go with commercially supported SAN. Otherwise, you could build and tweak TrueNAS Core (avoid Scale due to bad performance with small files and random IO). You could also choose to buy a pre-built Truenas system from iXsystem, which I can personally vouch for excellent pre and post-purchase support.
 

ano

Well-Known Member
Nov 7, 2022
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scale has gotten drasticly better with new zfs & version btw
 

hyltcasper

Member
May 1, 2020
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Yes it is production but I don't have enough money. The servers placed on Tier 3 Datacenter. There are 2 datacenters with 160km distance. Second site is just storing daily backups and hasn't enough resources to run workloads. It already works without storage without an issue for a 1 year because I'm lucky. I need to upgrade that. Before putting important data on it, I can test it with some situations like disk failure or power outage to ensure of durability. If anyone has good experience with VMware Vsan 8 ESA on not certified disks, I can try it too. I have to try free options, because of that I am looking for recommendations with experience.