vSphere VSAN Information Request

DarkDiamond · Fri Jun 27, 2014 5:20 pm

Hello,

I'm investigating the possibility of consolidating my lab from four servers into two. I currently have two Starwind v6 servers that provide storage to two ESXi nodes. I do not have any highly available storage on the iSCSI targets and I'm only licensed for the free version of your product.

If I were to deploy Starwind VSAN to one of my ESXi nodes, I'm assuming that it uses local storage to present one or more luns that other iSCSI initiators can connect to. Does it work similar to the Hyper-V VSAN product in that it can present the same LUN to both the ESXi host that has the VSAN VM on it as well as the other ESXi host in that cluster so that I can vMotion VM's been the two hosts?

In the past, I've experimented with virtualizing an iSCSI target on one ESXi host to create an "all-in-one" type of solution and had run into problems with the initiator on the "VSAN" host failing to connect to the target because the iSCSI VM was not started yet. This timeout caused the datastore to disappear until I did a manual rescan/refresh on the target to get the datastores to appear.

I'm hoping this makes sense and you can shed some light on my question.

Thanks!
Chris

DarkDiamond · Tue Jul 01, 2014 5:21 pm

Just a friendly bump to see if anyone had any information to share.

Wed Jul 02, 2014 8:16 am

Actually there is. Virtual SAN (that is version 8 of our software) can be installed on hte windows Server VM that runs on the ESXi hosts.
I hope that helped.

Please let me know if you`ll need some assistance.

DarkDiamond · Wed Jul 02, 2014 2:32 pm

That's good news. So from a technical perspective... I would create a VM to run Starwind VSAN v8. I would also create a vSwitch and attach a vNic to the Starwind VM. I would also attach the ESXi's iSCSI target to that vSwitch. This would let me attach storage presented by the Starwind VM to it's own host, similar in concept to a loopback mechanism.

Will the iscsi initiator on ESXi automatically retry to connect to the datastore after the Starwind VM comes back up or do I need to run a script at startup to perform a rescan of the datastores so that they appear?

Mon Jul 07, 2014 4:44 pm

That's good news. So from a technical perspective... I would create a VM to run Starwind VSAN v8. I would also create a vSwitch and attach a vNic to the Starwind VM. I would also attach the ESXi's iSCSI target to that vSwitch. This would let me attach storage presented by the Starwind VM to it's own host, similar in concept to a loopback mechanism.

Absolutelly correct!

Will the iscsi initiator on ESXi automatically retry to connect to the datastore after the Starwind VM comes back up or do I need to run a script at startup to perform a rescan of the datastores so that they appear?

It should to work in that way.