vmware storage solution - Supermicro 2029UZ-TN20R25M 2U

[dmaurice]

Hello All,

Was thinking of using the "Supermicro 2029UZ-TN20R25M" loaded with nvme drives as iSCSI endpoint for VMs but wanted to pick everyone's brains in regards to how to configure it.... should I slap freenas on it (what would be appropriate hba/raid card? if any?) and serve iscsi out. Or do you all recommend something else?

Looking for nvme hot -swap capabilities ...

or do you recommend something else ?

 

[Rand__]

Welcome to the forum.
It would be helpful to provide (significant) more info on the use case (# of vms, users, applications, type of apps) and requirements (minimum performance, availability requirements) and o/c the funds available for this

 

[dmaurice]

currently what the load is:

4 hosts, 68 VMs;
15 = DB (SQL)
the remaining are mix use from Terminal Servers/ Remote Desktop Sessions, Web Servers, AD Servers (dhcp,dns, ad), Desktops, etc..
Right now we Average 150 IOPS each VM

feeling like constrained by storage IOPS, was hoping to upgrade our storage, i think we are ok on compute..

budget = 8k tops

 

[Rand__]

Well I dont think there is an easy answer for you with that load profile - there is a reason why there are consultants doing this kind of planning ...
There is a lot of things that would need to be considered, from running different performance layers, to how to attach the stroage, to HA, to backup requirements and a bunch more...

Are you planning on buying new or used? Don't think you'll get far if your planning on new ...

 

[Net-Runner]

Since you are using NVMe drives, you should try looking at NVMe over fabrics. VMware has added support of NVMf in vSphere 7.0.

VMware | The Cloud Platform Tech Zone

Technical information for the core of the Software-Defined Data Center.

storagehub.vmware.com

I have plans to test it, just looking for a suitable hardware. There are several target implementations. You can use Linux one:

NVMe over Fabric | Storage Administration Guide | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1

.
Or there are Windows one (I think the only one).

StarWind Virtual SAN - Creating NVMe-oF - Resource Library

Configure the StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) solution and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) and get fast NVMe shared storage connected on CentOS 7.5 host.

www.starwindsoftware.com

Hope this helps.