Hello,

at the moment I setup my first V7 Active/Active iSCSI cluster.
Here is how I did it... What do you think? Is this best practice? Any errors?


NODE1
2 iSCSI Targets, each with 2 Logical Volumes
Target 1: vmfs01 (2x 600 GB Volume)
Target 2: vmfs02 (2x 2000 GB Volume)

NODE2
2 iSCSI Targets, each with 1 Logical Volume
Target 3: server01 (1x 2500 GB Volume)
Target 4: server02 (1x 1500 GB Volume)

Each with 4 Virtual IP addresses and 3x balance-rr bond for the Storage Replication.


I connect iSCSI Target 1 and 2 to my ESXi Servers and I connect Target 3 and Target 4 to physical Windows 2008 Servers.


Why this way ????

VMware: We only setup 600 GB VMFS Datastores but in this location we have one big fileserver. We don't need much performance, that's the reason why a VM is ok.
iSCSI Target 1 with the 2x 600 GB is the regular VMFS datastore for all Virtual Machines.
iSCSI Target 2 with the 2x 2000 GB is VMFS datastore, too - contain only the data disk of the virtual fileserver.
Benefit: If I have to add more diskspace to the fileserver I can remove iSCSI Target 2 from the cluster without the need to shutdown all Virtual Machines.

Windows Servers: Each server have his own iSCSI Target with only one LUN. So Server 1 never can access the disk of Server 2 by mistake and vice versa.
Second Benefit: If I have to add more diskspace to Server 1 I can keep Server 2 running.



Everythink ok?
Any comments?
Best Practice?



Thanks. :-)

Bye Manuel