Do you own a SAN?

At home? I use iSCSI, in fact I only know one person who uses FC at home... but then again he has an old Symmetrix 8830 is his garage and most of us prefer to keep cars there...

remyforbes777

Anyone every use FreeNas and get iSCSI to work on it?

Not with iSCSI I've never tried it, I usually use IET for Linux and StarWind for Windows (I have an NFR license for StarWind I use in my lab).

OpenFiler supports ISCSI too I believe.

I've got a IBM DS4300 + Brocade switch in the garage but its off as its loud and really sucks up the electricity. I've got a Linux box which I actually use which is running iSCSI and NFS for my VMware cluster. (Grrr VMware)

TechJunky wrote:

OpenFiler supports ISCSI too I believe.

Yeah. OpenFiler supports iSCSI.

Mishra

I own a Dell AX100i at home.

Wow Mishra, Thats like a 2k device for home use.

Nice!

TechJunky wrote:

Wow Mishra, Thats like a 2k device for home use.

Nice!

Yup and the DS4300 tiersten has is worth even more. And my friends Symm 8830 - well that's just nuts. It he ran it 24x7 I'm sure his electricity bill would be $2k. In case you don't know what I'm talking about here is one on eBay.

Thats nuckin futs!

I am just looking for an entry level EMC CX series.

TechJunky wrote:

I am just looking for an entry level EMC CX series.

Even the CX200's (you don't want old 4700's etc) are still $1500-4000 on eBay. If you have a CLARiiON at work, do you have access to EMC PowerLink? If so you may be able to download the Navisphere Simulator, it's not a real simulator (just a GUI application - unlike the NetApp one which is almost full blown Data ONTAP) but it would let you practice how to do things (like bind RAID groups, create LUNs, etc). I don't know if the latest version lets you do anything with Analyzer, MirrorView or SnapView (I wouldn't expect it) but it will at least get you up to speed with Navisphere basics.

What do you have at work?

Mishra

Sadly the AX100i's actually run Windows XP on their backend so there isn't much to learn from the AX100i. It's very loud and probably pulls a lot of power. I just steal the 250gig SATA drives out of it and use them for my servers.

There just isn't enough to learn about the hardware. It came with its very own UPS though! Nice rack mountable APC.

I have about a 10U UPS that I need to install at home though. ^_^ I used to get a lot of freebies. Working from the government, not so much.

dynamik

I use OpenFiler. I've been meaning to give StarWind a shot as well. I just haven't had a chance to play around with it yet.

We use EMC for our hardware/software. I am unsure of what we use to be honest. I know we use EMC Commvault for our backup software, but I have no idea on the SAN stuff. We have a couple SAN administrators that actually maintain that hardware.

I poked through the network shares and found NaviSphere for Server, NaviManager for Windows, Navisphere Service Taskbar, EMCSmarts, CX3-20 Install CD, InCharge6, PowerPath, CLAR Proc, and Customer_ClarionProc.exe.

So hopefully that gives you more info.

Even the CX200's (you don't want old 4700's etc) are still $1500-4000 on eBay.

True. I may just build a raid 5 box with 10 drives or so with OpenFiler. But then I would need an ESX Server to host all of my VMWare stuff too and that gets spendy quick...

Any suggestions for redundancy and an enterprise like situation configuration like ESX for cheap? I pretty much understand how it all works theory wise, but I haven't had to configure the hardware portion.

TechJunky wrote:

But then I would need an ESX Server to host all of my VMWare stuff too and that gets spendy quick...

Any suggestions for redundancy and an enterprise like situation configuration like ESX for cheap? I pretty much understand how it all works theory wise, but I haven't had to configure the hardware portion.

ESXi is free now. There are some guides floating around about which pieces of hardware are supported. If you get the right chipset then you can run it on a desktop PC since they added some SATA support a while ago.

vCole

We have an SAN through EMC, I know it's FC, not sure of the model though.

dynamik

TechJunky wrote:

True. I may just build a raid 5 box with 10 drives or so with OpenFiler. But then I would need an ESX Server to host all of my VMWare stuff too and that gets spendy quick...

Any suggestions for redundancy and an enterprise like situation configuration like ESX for cheap? I pretty much understand how it all works theory wise, but I haven't had to configure the hardware portion.

What's your motivation for obtaining a SAN? Just for ESX? Is there a reason you'd need iSCSI or FC over NFS or SMB/CIFS?

You're not going to want to go with raid-5, especially if it's managed through software. That would really hurt performance. raid-10 would probably be the best for performance and redundancy.

TechJunky, sounds like a CX3-20, which is a great entry into the middle tier of EMC SAN storage.

Check with the SAN administrators and ask them to check on PowerLink for you to see if they can download the simulator for you.

Also like dynamik said, if all you want to do is ESX, just use NFS through OpenFiler or something and make sure you do hardware RAID whatever type it is.

Software raid isn't an option. Who uses that in real life anyhow? Plus I want to test LUN failures etc, so it would be easy to remove a physical drive compared to curupting a software raid config. For what I am doing, really Raid 5 would be fine. True, Raid 10 is much faster and much more redundant. I just checked on raid cards and I am amazed how much raid 10 cards have come down. I just assumed they were much more expensive.

Good idea. So raid 10.

I dont need iscsi or FC, I just want to play with the technology. Isn't that why we all do it? I havent spliced fiber in a couple years and wouldn't mind brushing up.

As far as ESX is concerned, again no real need for it. I just want to learn how to install it and manage it etc.

Currently I dont really see anything hardware/config wise in my current position with the SAN or ESX stuff. I just know it runs on that platform and I use VMWare to provision new servers which are using space from the SAN.

*Just for learning purposes* And the cool factor to say I have a SAN and an ESX Server at home. ROFL.

TechJunky wrote:

And the cool factor to say I have a SAN and an ESX Server at home. ROFL.

Ah, but then you'll have to take it a step further like I did...

I have a SAN (iSCSI) and 2 node ESX cluster with Virtual Center - on my laptop.

dynamik

astorrs wrote:

I have a SAN (iSCSI) and 2 node ESX cluster with Virtual Center - on my laptop.

I don't know how you can enjoy that.

Tech, I just saw you mention raid and open filer and I assumed you were just going to go with the raid that open filer offers. It lets you do all that as well. Sorry about that.

If you want a cheap ESX setup, keep an eye on HP DL360s (you need G3 or later) on Ebay. I got two of those for under $250 total. Dual CPU 2.8ghz Xeons, 2.5gb and 2gb, two 36gb scsi disks, etc. I have an old AMD Sempron box that I'm going to use for open filer and nfs or iscsi.

This is actually a pretty decent price for "buy it now": http://cgi.ebay.com/2-PIECE-LOT-HP-PROLIANT-DL360-G3-DUAL-XEON-2-4GHZ-2GB_W0QQitemZ120293533364QQihZ002QQcategoryZ51215QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Edit: Drives aren't included, so maybe not. Those are the ones you'd want though.

Heh, I think my dad has 2 of those DL-360's sitting at home collecting dust. I may just see if he wants to host them at his house and I will configure them.

He just moved his companies datacenter and they just relinquished a ton of hardware to the employees. I am going to email him right now and see what kind of hardware he has sitting at home.

TechJunky wrote:

Software raid isn't an option. Who uses that in real life anyhow?

Sometimes you can actually get better performance from a software RAID setup than a hardware RAID controller. Your main CPU is going to be running at 2GHz+ whilst your hardware RAID controller even with XOR accelerator won't be going anywhere near that fast. One of the Linux IDE guys swears that software Linux RAID is superior to nearly all PC hardware RAID cards.

One advantage of software RAID is that you're fairly safe in terms of compatibility. If your hardware RAID card dies then you need to get one from the same manufacturer that will work the format of your current drives.

TechJunky wrote:

I just checked on raid cards and I am amazed how much raid 10 cards have come down. I just assumed they were much more expensive.

All of the really cheap RAID cards aren't actually hardware RAID if thats what you're looking for. They're mostly glorified PATA/SATA controllers and have all of the RAID functionality in firmware. At which point you might as well go for the OS based software RAID since its going via your CPU anyway.

TechJunky wrote:

*Just for learning purposes* And the cool factor to say I have a SAN and an ESX Server at home. ROFL.

I've got a 2 machine ESX cluster with DRS and HA at home for when I was doing my VCP.

dynamik: That is an insanely cheap price for those boxes. You couldnt purchase the proc's for that price, let alone two severs.

dynamik wrote:

I don't know how you can enjoy that.

I'm guessing you left yours in debug mode didn't you? Hence awful performance.

Benchmarking hardware RAID vs. Linux kernel software RAID

Bummer, all the drives I have are Ultra 160 SCSI. Between me and my dad we must have over 50 drives.

tiersten wrote:

Benchmarking hardware RAID vs. Linux kernel software RAID

Wow, some of the comments there are just ridiculous. I had to leave my own after reading that.

Would love to hear any comments you guys here might have on what I posted. Just no trash talking like over there.