Tiering SAN OS distribution ?

I am about to rebuild my lab and the storage server is a 3U box with 16 disks ... 12x147GB SAS and 4x1TB SAS, currently configured in Raid10 and Raid5 respectively. The arrays are configured on an Adaptec 5805 and is running CentOS 5 providing ISCSI and NFS shares.

Now it is being rebuild for my vSphere lab (time to tackle that VCAP) and I am trying to find out how to get the most out of it.

2012R2 now supports auto-tiering, which might be an option, I would have to make 2012 think though that the Raid10 LUN is an SSD LUN, as tiering only seems to work between SSD and HDD (seems, can't find proper documentation just yet).

Another option is FreeNAS ... I haven't worked much with it, but I am sure it won't tier either. We used to use Nexenta at work and we got burned, so not sure if I should use that again and I don't really know if the community edition (don't really fancing spending any more $£) supports tiering to begin with.

I suppose another option is to whack those LUNs into a Storage DRS cluster and let VMware do its thing ... Although using different performance levels in the same cluster doesn't really work and isn't really recommended ...

Anyone got any input / ideas / thoughts ?

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Comments

dave330i

Don't need anything too fancy for DCA. Your current config seems good enough. FYI, flagging a datastore as SSD is 1 of the test objectives.

jibbajabba

dave330i wrote: »

Don't need anything too fancy for DCA

Ah it's not just for the DCA anyway .. More like a "while I am at it I may as well utilize it"

dave330i wrote: »

FYI, flagging a datastore as SSD is 1 of the test objectives.

Easy enough, thanks

I just want to avoid doing things twice. Storage is one of those things, unless you got tons of resources, you can't really re-do without affecting your infrastructure ...