Cisco UCS and SAN Storage

millworx

So I know Cisco doesn't really make storage arrays. But I was wondering if it was possible to use lets say a C210 M2 fully populated with drives as San Storage for a Cisco B250 blade? I'm really kind of green to the whole storage side of things.

ColbyG

If it were running some sort of storage software, sure. It's not going to be a native SAN though, no.

millworx

Hmmm looks like Solaris 10 9/10 is supported on the UCS C210 M2... Maybe I can just load that on the chassis and make it a giant NFS Share.

Everyone

Run FreeNAS on it, and you can turn it into an iSCSI SAN...

millworx

yeah I've heard about FreeNAS I was going to build one for my home lab. Can it run on a UCS Chassis?

vCole

What are you looking to do? If you put FreeNAS on the C210 M2 then use iSCSI/NFS to mount to the blade you'll be fine. Can you go anymore indepth about your end goal?

millworx

vCole wrote: »

What are you looking to do? If you put FreeNAS on the C210 M2 then use iSCSI/NFS to mount to the blade you'll be fine. Can you go anymore indepth about your end goal?

Okay heres the scoop. I actually work for Cisco. BUT my group does not deal with storage networking at all. I don't even know anyone in the storage team. I'm putting together a request to upgrade our teams lab servers from old MCS 7800-I2 machines. They are running out of space, are no longer under warranty, and we need more VMs.

We eat our own dogfood here, so we get our products for next to nothing for inhouse use (like 5c on the dollar). Going to an outside vendor like NetAPP / EMC is out of the budget for SAN. I was planning on getting a 5108 chassis and put blades in it which would be adequate to run our VM's. Since outside vendors will be outside of our budget for storage, I was thinking about getting a C210 M2 fully populated with 600gb drives in it. This would be extremely cheap compared to going with a traditional solution.

But as I am limited in the storage area of things I don't know where to go really.

vCole

millworx wrote: »

Okay heres the scoop. I actually work for Cisco. BUT my group does not deal with storage networking at all. I don't even know anyone in the storage team. I'm putting together a request to upgrade our teams lab servers from old MCS 7800-I2 machines. They are running out of space, we need more VMs.

We eat our own dogfood here, so we get our products for next to nothing for inhouse use (like 5c on the dollar). Going to an outside vendor like NetAPP / EMC is out of the budget for SAN. I was planning on getting a 5108 chassis and put blades in it which would be adequate to run our VM's. Since outside vendors will be outside of our budget for storage, I was thinking about getting a C210 M2 fully populated with 600gb drives in it. This would be extremely cheap compared to going with a traditional solution.

But as I am limited in the storage area of things I don't know where to go really.

You could most definitely present the storage from the C210 M2 to the blades as storage. Either by NFS or iSCSI. However, not sure on how the performance will be depending on the drives you get. freeNAS can do iSCSI or NFS (among many other protocols.) Looks like this video may help: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXmxO_YXbVM

Everyone

What are you using for virtualization, VMware?

millworx

vCole wrote: »

You could most definitely present the storage from the C210 M2 to the blades as storage. Either by NFS or iSCSI. However, not sure on how the performance will be depending on the drives you get. freeNAS can do iSCSI or NFS (among many other protocols.) Looks like this video may help: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXmxO_YXbVM

This is the configuration I'm building out for my C210.

R210-2121605W
UCS C210 M2 Srvr w/1PSU, w/o CPU, mem, HDD, DVD or PCIe card 1
A01-X0123
Intel Xeon E5606 2.13GHz /4c/80W/8MB cache/DDR3 1066MHz 1
N01-M304GB1
4GB DDR3-1333MHz RDIMM/PC3-10600/dual rank 1Gb DRAMs 1
R210-ODVDRW
DVD-RW Drive for UCS C210 M1 Rack Servers 1
R2XX-PL003
LSI 6G MegaRAID 9261-8i card (RAID 0,1,5,6,10,60) - 512WC 1
N2XX-AQPCI01
Qlogic QLE 8152-CNA 2port 10Gb SFP+ Copper 1
A03-D600GA2
600GB 6Gb SAS 10K RPM SFF HDD/hot plug/drive sled mounted 8
CAB-AC-250V/13A
North America,NEMA L6-20 250V/20A plug-IEC320/C13 receptacle 1
Included: N20-BBLKD
HDD slot blanking panel for UCS B-Series Blade Servers 8
Included: R200-PCIBLKF1
PCIe Full Height blanking panel for UCS C-Series Rack Server 3
Included: R210-BHTS1
CPU heat sink for UCS C210 M1 Rack Server 1
Included: R210-SASCBL-002
Long SAS Cable for C210 (connects to SAS Extender) 2
Included: R210-SASXTDR
SAS Extender (servers requiring </= 8 HDDs) for UCS C210 M1 1
Included: R2X0-PSU2-650W-SB
650W power supply, w/added 5A Standby for UCS C200 or C210 1
Included: R2XX-PSUBLKP
Power supply unit blnking pnl for UCS 200 M1 or 210 M1 1

Everyone wrote: »

What are you using for virtualization, VMware?

Yes ESX4.1

Everyone

Ok, to get the most out of it, you could use the C210 M2 as both an ESXi 4.1 host, and a FreeNAS 8.0.1 storage controller.

Run ESXi and FreeNAS off of thumb drives. Make sure the FreeNAS VM is the first on the boot order. Pass all the storage hardware through to the FreeNAS VM, as well as one of the USB ports so it can boot from its thumb drive. Configure iSCSI LUNs in FreeNAS, and connect all your ESXi hosts to them.

You're going to want more RAM in that box though.

powerfool

LeftHand (HP) used to have a virtual appliance that you could install and do "Network RAID" with it. Just essentially take all of the local storage and give it to the LeftHand VSA and make one on each ESX/ESXi host... then make them into a cluster and point all of the hosts to the storage cluster.

Also, for those interested, I saw an ad for Nutanix - Compute. Storage. Complete. on the site here. They essentially run a hardware cluster that is optimized to span storage throughout the nodes... this is made for VMware.

There is also another company, Stratus (Uptime Assurance | High Availability from Stratus Technologies), I was looking at yesterday that does hardware fault tolerance for VMware implementations... essentially like an old Windows Server cluster, but for VMware...

millworx

I am assuming I will need a MDS fabric switch to interconnect the C210 to the blade chassis/blades correct?

RTmarc

If you're going to run iSCSI I wouldn't think so. Just a couple (or more) high-speed NICs (VICs or otherwise) should be sufficient. If you're going to be running the blade chassis you'll already have the 6120s. Plug the servers and chassis into that and you're set.

ColbyG

millworx wrote: »

I am assuming I will need a MDS fabric switch to interconnect the C210 to the blade chassis/blades correct?

No. Those are Fibre Channel switches. Can you get a storage engineer involved to assist you?