Lab SAN Advice

[DomStone]

Hey guys, doing some upgrades to my home lab setup and need some advice. I don't have a lot of experience with SANs, so I want to make sure I'm doing this right. I'm using this lab for my various Cisco and other studies.

 

Here is my setup:

Bunch of Cisco IOS devices

3x Cisco UCS C250M2s, 2 with 196gb RAM and 1TB storage via 8 10k 2.5 SAS drives, 1 with 384gb RAM and 1TB storage via 10k 2.5 SAS drives (all 3 running RAID 0, yeah yeah I know bad)

1x Xeon E3-1226 with 16gb RAM and 3x 4TB WD drives running in RAID5 (currently my Plex/storage server)

 

So here is what I'm thinking, I'm basically maxing out my storage across my lab servers (UCS boxes) and I want to get a SAN to ease the storage burden here. But I'm also running a lot of VMs across these platforms so I want to make sure I'm not going to hurt the current performance.

 

I'm thinking something like this:

http://www.natex.us/24bay-FreeNAS-p/24tbfreenas.htm

 

Will do the trick, with 24 1TB drives in a RAID for some redundancy. Maybe throw in a 1TB SSD for a cache if that will increase performance. And 10Gb fiber channel cards with a 10Gb switch.

 

Do you guys think this would perform OK with 100+ VMs? They aren't necessarily intense applications running, and the performance is fine on the servers now. I just want to make sure I don't negatively impact performance by introducing a fiber channel link to pull the data I guess. I have very very little knowledge about this stuff. The other issue I see with this build from Natex is 3 RAID cards, not being a RAID guru but I assume there is a way to bring those together into a single array? If anyone has suggestions it would be much appreciated. 

 

Thanks 

- Dom

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 minutes ago, DomStone said:

I'm thinking something like this:

http://www.natex.us/24bay-FreeNAS-p/24tbfreenas.htm

 

Will do the trick, with 24 1TB drives in a RAID for some redundancy. Maybe throw in a 1TB SSD for a cache if that will increase performance. And 10Gb fiber channel cards with a 10Gb switch.

Are you running fiberchannel or ethernel? I don't think there was a 10g fiberchannel.

 

No real need for a ssd cache in most uses, lots of ram is better.

 

That server is 5+ years old now. You can also built your own if you want, its just freenas. Id probably buy something like this instead

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SUPERMICRO-4U-24-BAY-846E1-R900B-X8DTE-F-2X-L5520-8GB-24x-TRAYS-ASR-5805-/172344741754?hash=item28208c0f7a:g:5rwAAOSw8gVX3HMQ

 

Then install freenas. It will performan about the same. Id also add some ram(probably 96 or 48g)

 

Also id get fewer bigger drives.

[leadeater]

You could just use something like Nutanix Community Edition + ESXi to pool the storage across all your servers. Just add a single SSD to each of them and if you need a lot of bulk storage use an external JBOD disk shelf on two of them and add disks as required.

[DomStone]

Ok cool, thanks for the information. I was looking at 10gb fiber cards on ebay a few weeks back, something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEXTEN-QLOGIC-10GB-DUAL-PORT-PCI-E-FIBER-OPTIC-NIC-CARD-NX3-20G-NO-SPFS-/122071436702?hash=item1c6c064d9e:g:cAwAAOSwCfdXok1s

 

As for that SuperMicro server, that is a much better price. I'll take a look into that and price it out. I have a bunch of spare RAM from the UCS builds I did, so I can probably run 48gb no problem.

 

Thanks guys 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, DomStone said:

Ok cool, thanks for the information. I was looking at 10gb fiber cards on ebay a few weeks back, something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEXTEN-QLOGIC-10GB-DUAL-PORT-PCI-E-FIBER-OPTIC-NIC-CARD-NX3-20G-NO-SPFS-/122071436702?hash=item1c6c064d9e:g:cAwAAOSwCfdXok1s

 

As for that SuperMicro server, that is a much better price. I'll take a look into that and price it out. I have a bunch of spare RAM from the UCS builds I did, so I can probably run 48gb no problem.

 

Thanks guys 

fiberchannel is different that ethernet and uses a completly different packet system. Thats a ethernet card.

 

 

[DomStone]

Ah ok. I've never worked with this before, I've been stuck in the application world too long I guess. Thanks