SMH, GL when your HW raid ctrl fails, hope you have a spare on hand, me, I'll be swapping in a cheap HBA or swapping disks quickly to another 'highly available' system...oh and with powerful snapshot/clone/replication capabilities.Hi,
I’ve been trying to build almost a similar setup for one of my customers’ a while ago and would like to share my experience. I hope it might be useful.
I would recommend you to avoid FreeNAS and similar stuff for production usage unless you’re are totally familiar with this product since it’s your primary storage and in this case, it is self-supported only. ESXi is a great choice, moreover, I would definitely recommend you looking towards two similar hosts and building a highly available cluster.
For a shared storage you do not need a SAN or NAS. It’s a single point of failure and directly attached drives are much faster. The most obvious option is VMware VSAN vSAN Software-Defined Shared Storage but it’s quite anemic in two-node setup and requires the damn witness. We are using Starwinds StarWind Software – StarWind Virtual SAN® – Starwindsoftware.com for this purposes because it is less expensive, works on top of hardware RAID which is very good because of improved performance and reliability (having a complete and consistent set of data in each host is priceless) and it does RDMA (unlike VSAN) which is very good too because we have Mellanox ConnectX3 and they work great with Starwind.
I’ve built such a setup by myself (SuperMicro-based) but requested the quotation for Starwind ready-nodes StarWind HyperConverged Appliance too. Surprisingly their price tag for similar DELL-based setup was not much higher.
To each their own I suppose though, the 'a SAN is a SPOF' is what I am shaking my head at btw, I'm not going to EVEN go there, those of us that know KNOW :-D
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