Earlier this week the VMware VI Team Blog reported that as of ESX version 3.5 Update 1 Storage VMotion is now officially supported for iSCSI SANs. This means that administrators can reorganize virtual machines without down time in order to match any storage needs. The Storage VMotion and 10Gb Ethernet support for iSCSI SAN’s post explains:

“Although Storage VMotion is designed to work with any type of storage, it was initially supported only with Fibre Channel SANs. As of Update 1, Storage VMotion is supported with iSCSI SAN’s for moving virtual machine disk files in the following scenarios:

- From iSCSI SANs to other iSCSI SANs

- From iSCSI SANs to FibreChannel SANs

- From FibreChannel SANs to iSCSI SANs

In addition, we now support the use of 10Gb Ethernet for iSCSI in a VMware Infrastructure environment.”

In my experience Storage VMotion has worked great, but be careful with VMs that have higher I/O utilizations. (more…)

Move over Lefthand Networks VSA, xtravirt.com has provided a free alternative for creating a virtual iSCSI SAN. Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) is a virtual machine appliance that runs on two of your ESX hosts’ local VMFS datastores to create a single, synchronized iSCSI SAN. XVS allows the creation of ESX clusters for VI3 Enterprise features without purchasing a physical shared storage solution.

“The Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS) appliance for VMware ESX3 Server is a free solution to provide the benefits of shared VMFS storage without the cost of a SAN – this allows the utilisation of otherwise unused local storage in the ESX server to facilitate enterprise level features such as vMotion, DRS and HA normally only available through the use of a shared storage device. All volume data is synchronously replicated between hosts, providing full fail-over capability with data integrity in the event of host, disk or appliance failure.”

XVS is the perfectly priced storage solution for the home ESX test lab, small and mediium businesses, or the small remote branch office.

To download a copy of the virtual appliance and for more about XVS go to xtravirt.com.

updated 5.24.08

Currently XVS is only configurable as a single LUN across paired ESX hosts. A third ESX hosts can use the virtual ip address for it’s SAN, but the additional host(s) would not be using their local storage as part of the synchronized SAN. Future editions will hopefully expand the storage across more than 2 ESX hosts.

I get asked this all the time. “How many NICs does ESX need? 2, 4, 6 or more?”

Well, it’s not really about how many NICs ESX needs. I’m not recommending it, but the fact of the matter is that VI3 really only needs 1 NIC per ESX host. It’s just smarter for a company to build some redundancy and load balancing into their VI design. So, let’s say then that ESX just needs 2 NICs minimum.

The real question is “How many NICs does your network infrastructure and VI performance require?” Do you have or will you have: (more…)

This post is more of an idea then a report. If you’ve experimented with a design similar to my thoughts below please post a comment and let me know!

Have you tried to configure VMs in a MS cluster across separate ESX hosts? How about clustering a physical server with a VM? VMware’s guide can be found here. Referencing this guide I am specifically talking about “Clustering Virtual Machines Across Physical Hosts (Cluster Across Boxes)” and “Clustering Physical Machines and Virtual Machines (Standby Host)”.

Read the guide and you’ll find there are several prerequisites and restrictions. The most important ones being:

• you must use RDMs in physical mode for shared storage
• dedicate at least 2 physical nics to the VMs
• you can not use multipathing software
• you must use the LSILogic virtual SCSI adapter in your VMs
• you can only use 32 bit VMs. You can not cluster with 64 bit VMs
• iSCSI disks are not supported. NAS disks are not supported.
• you can only use 2 node clustering
• the boot disks for the VMs must be on local storage
• clustered VMs can not participate in an ESX cluster and use VMotion, DRS and HA

So how do we design a clustered VM application that can fully leverage VMotion, DRS, and HA? (more…)

Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware ESX

I’ve been hearing about it all week. The President of my company sent me an email about this at the start of the conference. I finally got to talk to the LeftHand team at their booth today about their new virtual appliance - VSA.

You can download a trial version of VSA here.

Some notes about implementing VSA:

1. you must reserve 1 GB ram for VSA on each ESX host
2. you must reserve 2 GHz cpu for VSA on each ESX host
3. you must create a dedicated Gigabit virtual switch for VSA on each ESX host

After you configure the VSA VMs on each of your local ESX VMFS they are clustered and data is “striped” between all hosts. Then if one host goes down the data is still available to the VMs as they are VMotion-ed or restarted via HA on the other hosts.

The VSA has native ability to do SAN based replication via the WAN.

(more…)

So, I woke up this morning to an email from the President of my company about LeftHand Network’s new virtual appliance. I wrote about this briefly yesterday.

LeftHand Readies “Unique” Virtual SANs

Computerwire

Tim Stammers

September 10, 2007

http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=51A3C125%2D40D7%2D40D7%2D823E%2DE4A0FA2EE226

LeftHand Networks claims that it is poised to both halve the cost of providing HA protection for VMware servers, and free stranded disk space in those platforms, by creating a virtual SAN inside VMware ESX clusters.

In the next quarter the company will ship a version of its SAN/iQ clustered and virtualized storage software that can run on a VMware virtual server — delivered as a virtual appliance.

That means that LeftHand will be trailing a raft of other suppliers such as FalconStor and DataCore, which have already ported their storage virtualization software from physical servers to VMware-hosted virtual servers.

Now I am definitely checking this out ASAP!!

Now this I have to see to believe, or even understand!

from LeftHand Networks:

Imagine a fully featured, scalable SAN with all the enterprise class features that customers have come to expect, all running in VMs, converting your storage internal to VI3 servers into a clustered iSCSI SAN. This SAN/iQ based Virtual Storage Platform provides all of the SAN services necessary for storage provisioning, data protection, management and availability for demanding datacenter environments. The solution offers scalable capacity and performance along with advanced data availability via LeftHand’s Network RAID and multi-site SAN capabilities.

Can’t quite picture it? LeftHand has a demo you can download. Try running it in a VM on your laptop and turn the laptop’s VM storage into a fully featured SAN, and while you’re at it, add one of your buddy’s laptop’s storage that’s on the network into your SAN. Now that’s cool!