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Thread: BCM5709 iSCSI boot, Open E and vSphere

  1. #1

    Default BCM5709 iSCSI boot, Open E and vSphere

    Hi everyone, reasonably new to VMWare and Open E on this sort of scale in practise but I understand a lot of the concepts.

    What I am proposing to do:
    Run 2x physical servers with Open E on them
    I will also posess an NFS Failover license
    So both devices are redundant

    Run 2x physical servers with vSphere ESXi 5 installed to pool resources (eventually I would like to implement HA and vMotion once I prove that this will work the way I intend)
    Each physical server will have two teamed gigabit connections to two different switches most likely a Cisco SGE20026 for network redundancy.

    Setup (for example) 5 virtual servers running server 2008 R2, one virtual server running CentOS for Postfix, one virtual server running Zabbix. However, the actual OS is installed and all data is run from the Open E devices.

    I am planning on using BCM5709 quad port NIC PCIe NIC cards as they are reasonably cheap and this system is just a proof of concept for something much larger. But I read this thread http://communities.vmware.com/thread...rt=60&tstart=0 suggesting that BCM5709's do not support iSCSI boot.

    The ultimate goal is rundundant storage, redudant switching and redundant processing. Am I on the right track with what I am doing? Or can someone suggest a better implementation.

    See link for the plan as it sits in my head. Please excuse crude nature of the diagram.

    http://communities.vmware.com/servle...8028/diag1.png

  2. #2

    Default

    For iSCSI there is project that that can make iscsi boot device from almost all network interfaces http://ipxe.org/
    but this requires some skills and it can destroy the NIC if not done right. Some of the Intel NICs also offer this feature.
    I would recommend a 10GbE for the Volume Replication to each DSS V6 and you can directly connect them also use MPIO w/ the ESX servers. See links below.

    http://www.open-e.com/service-and-su...-to-resources/
    Open-E iSCSI and NFS Failover
    2011.11 Open-E DSS V6 Synchronous Volume Replication with Failover over a LAN (broadcast)

    Others
    2011.08 Open-E DSS V6 MPIO with ESXi 4.x
    All the best,

    Todd Maxwell


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