VMWare Infrastructure 3.0.1 and Open-E

I am currently using the Open-E trial CD with a server we had sitting around hooked to 2 - 73GB SCSI, 4 - 36 GB SCSI and 2 - 80GB SATA drives.

That box is plugged to a Gig switch and serving iSCSI to two SuperMicro dual quad core host machines with 16GB mem each. The host systems have copper Qlogic 4050 iSCSI HBA's and I'm using them to boot from the Open-E iSCSI SAN.

I've allocated two 10GB LUN's for each ESX host OS and a large LUN to store VMDK files. In addition to this I've allocated an NFS share to backup the VMDK files using esXpress. esXpress backs up running virtual machines like esxRanger but for a lot less. Another option that works well is the venerable VMBK.pl perl script. But it won't do differential backups like esXpress or incremental like exsRanger.

I've successfully snapshotted the large VMDK storage LUN, made the snapshot available through the DSS web interface, rescanned the LUN's, mounted the snapshot, hot-added one of the VMDK files from the snapshotted LUN to a separate virtual machine and pulled individual files from the snapshot VMDK file. :-) Fun stuff. I like that the NFS and SMB shares are in the same location so you can copy files from virtual machine to virtual machine for file restore purposes.

This is still in the test phase but it seems to be working very well. Performance is similar to other SAN products that we've been testing.

Next step is exploring an automatic backup to USB disk for off-site backup storage -- some way to move the esXpress backup files (which are large) to the USB disk for some D2D2OSD action.

On order are the following (open-e guys stop me if something won't work with your system! ;-) )

(releveraging two 2.4Ghz supermicros with 2GB RAM each as "head units") and adding the following for each box:
LSI SAS3801X - SAS HBA's
Promise Vtrak E310s (provides internal hardware RAID 6)
12x - 500GB hard drives for each Vtrak
2x Open-e DSS storage server's

Let me know if anyone has questions about how I accomplished some of these things. I can't remember details about things off the top.

Thanks and good luck.

P.S. Open-E is there any way to get the DSS storage software on to the IDE flash card instead of the USB?

I have the above working but a couple of questions have arisen.

1. The SAS card that I am using in the head units will only work 100% right if I use the 'experimental' kernel during boot time. I have modified it so they both boot from that kernel everytime. If it boots from the regular, 4 'units' show up that are all the same size (4TB) but there is only 1 - 4TB unit. When in experimental only 1 unit shows up. The SAS card isn't on your HBA so I guess I just need to know when the 'experimental' kernel will the be the 'main' kernel.

2. When provisioning iSCSI LUNs for use with the ESX host servers I have to make sure that none of the LUN numbers overlap at all or ESX seems to think that it's a redundant connection to the same LUN. For instance I setup a 15 GB partition and a 40GB partition. Then create two targets iqn.2007-08:mcc-storage.target0 and iqn.2007-08:mcc-storage.target1. Following this I assign the 15 GB partition to target0 as LUN 0 and the 40GB partition to target1 as LUN 0. I expect then for VMWare to recognize two targets one 15 and one 40GB.

What happens though is VMWare sees two 15GB partitions and it seems to think that those partitions are two paths to the same LUN.

Anyone else experience this same thing and is there a VMWare setting that disables the multi-pathing?

Also (and this is minor) VMWare does not pickup on the 'Alias' when it scans the LUN's. All of my LUN's show a blank Alias and it'd be nice to know which one is which.

3. Occasionally on the console of the VMWare host servers I'll get disconnect warnings saying that the connection to the a certian LUN is gone (ie scsi0:0:0:0). Anyone else see this?

4. Another thing (this probably belongs in feature requests) is that it'd be nice to have some comment fields when creating volumes. I create a volume for each VM that I'm going to be deploying so that I can use snapshots for some and not for others (thus saving on the snapshot load). But when I'm looking at the list of 25-30 volumes I have a hard time remembering which volume goes with which server and which volume is assigned to which iSCSI target.

So there you go. I'm sure there's more; let's start with that.

Thanks,
Ryan
Michigan Catholic Conference