Hey,
I'm finding myself a bit outside my depth and looking for some advice. My current setup consists of a single node, running ESXi 5.1 (vAncient, I know), with a single HDD data store. This has been serving home networking duties and light development tasks well for a long time, but to be really usable I've determined I need more storage.
So, I'm just about to finish up building a disk shelf which will add some much needed storage capacity, and now need to start thinking about how to actually use all the new space, and finding myself with some analysis paralysis. The shelf will have 16 disks and be connected via a LSI 9200-8e.
First, what would be the best way to expose the disks? My guess would be to just do a passthrough of the HBA to a VM (running what?) and expose it back to ESXi via iSCSI or NFS? Are there other options I should consider?
Storage will both be used for VM disks, but the bulk will be for file shares. Could/should this difference be handled by this VM with the HBA, or should that better be a separate VM that serves as a file server?
I'm also hoping to add another hypervisor node soonish. How, if at all, would that affect the best approach? The node having the HBA will be a SPOF, reasonably, but outside of fancy multipath capabilities, do I have any alternatives? I'll probably have to upgrade the networking at that point too (currently only have 1 GbE switching)...
I'm finding myself a bit outside my depth and looking for some advice. My current setup consists of a single node, running ESXi 5.1 (vAncient, I know), with a single HDD data store. This has been serving home networking duties and light development tasks well for a long time, but to be really usable I've determined I need more storage.
So, I'm just about to finish up building a disk shelf which will add some much needed storage capacity, and now need to start thinking about how to actually use all the new space, and finding myself with some analysis paralysis. The shelf will have 16 disks and be connected via a LSI 9200-8e.
First, what would be the best way to expose the disks? My guess would be to just do a passthrough of the HBA to a VM (running what?) and expose it back to ESXi via iSCSI or NFS? Are there other options I should consider?
Storage will both be used for VM disks, but the bulk will be for file shares. Could/should this difference be handled by this VM with the HBA, or should that better be a separate VM that serves as a file server?
I'm also hoping to add another hypervisor node soonish. How, if at all, would that affect the best approach? The node having the HBA will be a SPOF, reasonably, but outside of fancy multipath capabilities, do I have any alternatives? I'll probably have to upgrade the networking at that point too (currently only have 1 GbE switching)...
