[Closed] SAN software - any storage experts in the house?

Not an expert in SAN but have a bit of storage background. Isn’t your MSA already an iSCSI SAN?

remove the storageworks (which i assume is the x1600 NAS head currently with the MSA as expansion capacity)from the equation and present the MSA SAN to the VMs per LUN?

Or are you trying to do something cleverer than that?

So what are you trying to get, an iSCSI target? Last time i tried to ghetto something like that I was using something from Solarwinds.

These days i'd just use server 2016 and Hyper-V instead of VMware and just allocate storage every which way from Sunday with (the frankly amazing) storage spaces. It's nothing short of witchcraft. I understand that licence cost might be a pain in the arse for that though.

It's a dev environment so MS costs aren't an issue, I can use MSDN.

I'm tied to VMware and in any case I know little about Hyper-V.

remove the storageworks (which i assume is the x1600 NAS head currently with the MSA as expansion capacity)from the equation and present the MSA SAN to the VMs per LUN?

Yeah.  How?  The MSA plugs into the StorageWorks box with a frankly weird cable, I've no means of directly attaching it to the switch.

Fundamentally I simply don't understand most of this (though I know what a LUN is).  I have a pile of tin, a switch and some VMware servers.  I want to go "hey, here's two datastores" to that stack, it doesn't have to be divided up or anything.

Last time i tried to ghetto something like that I was using something from Solarwinds

Starwind?

Is that a mini-SAS cable? Like this?  http://www.intelligentservers.co.uk/components/hp-external-mini-sas-2m-cable-407339-b21-408767-001/?gclid=CjwKCAjworfdBRA7EiwAKX9HeCw2WMP2_vbIKkuHLpLyfhhNDrZXfR5D2jHnX6iaWrwUvFxPT3eSsxoCCTAQAvD_BwE

whether it is or not, it’s not iSCSI so you can ignore the rest of what I said.

Can that storageworks box present NFS shares? If so ESXi (or whatever it’s called these days) can consume that directly.

Is that a mini-SAS cable? Like this?

Possibly?  Certainly looks like it, it's not a technology I've seen anywhere else bar this box (and also an Ultrium tape drive).

Can that storageworks box present NFS shares?

I assume that'd depend on the software it was running, which is what I was asking after.

You don't have to use zfs on freenas. If you have hardware raid controllers you can let them do their thing and run either the native bsd filesystem for NFS or simply export the block device for iscsi.

You do not need direct disk access to do this, you simple select the volume presented by the controller.

Right,  this might help - wrong model of MSA but in principle :

So the MSA will be either "fc" fibre channel , "i" iscsi or "sa" sas

To connect to the servers you will need to connect the MSA  via a "switch" to each server corresponding :

fc card , network, or SAS port. the "switch" has to be fc,network, or sas

You will then need to login/manage the MSA  to create LUNS to present to hosts(servers)

If you have a mix of server cards and not enough then if you can present all the storage to one server via fc/sas

then you could get that server to be an iscsi  vendor for the other servers.

So in summary you need to find out whether its  to be FC,iscsi, or SAS .

I've used Unraid on a little microserver for quite a few years now. Hosting a few random bits of software, Plex, Git and general NAS duties. It's been really solid. Software RAID type setup, very reliable from my experience, easy to SSH into if you need to but it's got a nice little console for installing apps, dockers or running full VMs from it. Drives can be later added to the pool, used as a parity drive, cache drives etc.

My server is an ancient NL54, probably less powerful than my phone, so the OS certainly isn't hungry.

I hope this is something to do with "SAN", I can't say it's an acronym I've ever used 😛