Hey all

Looking for some suggestions on hardware I can use for a SAN solution. I have esx running on a R620 and R630. Playing around with vcenter and migrating VM’s. Would like to dip my toe into iscsi or similar solutions. Ideally I’d want something that can support PCI bifurcation… Cause much like everything homelab related, I’m likely going to get carried away.

FC is an option I’m willing to consider to connect everything as I’m basically out of 10G ports on my switch until I can get around to configuring my brocade

  • CanuckFire@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    The biggest thing about SAN is you are now handling block storage instead of file, so there are some logical and workflow differences you need to wrap your head around.

    You can share these volumes over iscsi (ethernet) or fibre channel quite easily, but most people use iscsi because it is really easy to put it on its own subnet/VLAN on your existing switch to get it running as opposed to buying FC cards and a separate switch.

    You should really always keep iscsi on its own VLAN to keep other network traffic from destroying your performance…

    If you are just mucking about I would suggest just getting a couple of SSD and an optiplex sff for cheap.

    Software you could start with the SolarWinds san as it is pretty easy to set up.

    If you want to keep a San as a purpose built device, definitely look into ESOS (enterprise storage os) as it supports a lot of hardware (nvme) and is capable of scaling up to enterprise levels.

    You also don’t need an absurd amount of hardware for a San… You might be raising the bar if you want nvme but you need very little ram and basically just a relatively modern cpu.

    Read up on a few of these blog posts on the hardware he deploys to test ESOS and you’ll get some comparison points. https://marcitland.blogspot.com/2017/05/millions-of-iops-with-esos-nvme.html?m=1

    • Warm_Soup@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I have an old HP t620 Plus kicking around from when I used it for pFsense… I could probably try and install something on that. You mentioned SolarWinds, is that free? (I guess I can google around to find out as well).

      I’m not really sure what this thing has in it, so maybe I’ll crack the shell 1st and see what I can do to add storage if needed.

      • CanuckFire@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I caught a mistake, it is Starwinds san and there was a full-featured free version. They seem to have updated their page so I am less familiar with the new vsan software so dig into it if you are curious.

        I did spin up ESOS as well and that is a fairly simple thing to start up if you just want to try and build a volume to test out.

        Your t620 is an AMD APU with some sata and PCIe. You can probably just put in an SSD to see how it goes and scale up to new/bigger hardware if you want.

        I know that I still have a bunch of FC hardware and it is pretty cool tech. Super low latency purpose built storage protocol.