Protocol War

NightShade03

@ work we are trying to purchase a new blade chassis. We are going with the IBM H series and a NetApp FAS2040 storage SAN. The argument between the vendors I've spoken with are between what protocol to use between the two devices....I'm looking for advice from anyone that either uses or has configured a system like this. I've heard to use NFS, iSCSI, FiberChannel, FCoE.

Also I don't know if it makes a difference but we will be running a full virtual infrastructure on the blades in the chassis which will push all images/data to the SAN (obv).

Fugazi1000

The type of workload on the BladeCenter should influence the decision. What is planned?

Other factors are the skills you have to manage the infrastructure, and future expansion.

FC is mature and capable of scaling well but does cost. iSCSI is less expensive, though less mature, and depending on the workload requires TOE cards. These tend not to fit in semi-commodity hardware such as a BladeCenter. NFS may be appropriate but similar constraints to iSCSI - you've just moved them up to the filesystem. FCoE - the jury is still out!


For what it's worth - the organisation I work for has an extensive FC SAN (a few actually) and hence it's our protocol of choice. We have BladeCenters (many) but only a few are SAN attached. These work best for us with local disks. But they have no need to access shared storage. We have considered and discounted iSCSI and keeping a watching brief on FCoE. We use NFS but not for this use-case.

In terms of 'industry standard' (if there is such a thing) on a virtual infrastructure such as VMWare across all 14 blades with a mixed guest workload - I think the consensus will be Fibre Channel. You will need to provision all blades with an HBA and the chassis with a FC switch module (2 for each fabric). That's where the costs start mounting.

NightShade03

Thanks for the info this is a good start for what I was looking for.

We are going to have 3 virtual machines per blade running (1 SAP, 1 SQL, 1 QAS). These are all going to be booting off the SAN as well as hosting the data from SAP and the SQL database for SAP. I would image that the protocol used between the Chassis and the SAN would need to be efficient for application use. I'm still doing some research on the different protocols for a deeper understanding.