Entry level SAN for VMware ESXi

To get some good "storage experts", I would recommend changing your "Computers Zone" to the "Storage" zone. I personally only have experience with EMC SANs, but others can comment on what they've used. Some questions that do need to be asked/answered - what's your budget, what's your company size, what are some of your goals/features you want to be able to get out of your SAN besides virtualization utilization?

~coolsport00

Do you want redundancy? I always ask that because people think that they can have a cluster of two servers running VMware attached to a single FreeNAS or similar box and think it's somehow more reliable than just getting a single big server and having the storage inside it.

But for intensive I/O most highly recommend local storage on RAID. many are still on the fence about local storage VS SAN.

here's the link to the EMC SAN:
http://www.emc.com/products/detail/hardware/clariion-ax4.htm

How much money have you got?

FreeNAS, Openfiler, all very slow, but what you pay is what you get. There are other alternatives, iomega, Qnap, NetApp, EMC, HP

What virtual machines are you going to be using?

Budget is negotiable, but I'd say around $10k, company size is approximately 20, but we are building test servers to demo our product. Redundancy would be good, but not required

We would like to be able to use vMotion to migrate guests to different hosts, as well as possibly creating linked clones in the future.

The problem is that we are using PCI devices on each host that are required, so we get a max of 4 guests per host as a physical limitation. Migrating hosts around is becoming a time sink.

That EMC SAN I pointed you to would work within that budget then. It integrates well with VMWare.

No more HP MSA..only P series.  Old MSA 2000 now P2000.  Almost thought it was a lefthand

Same thing though, they've just moved "MSA" to the other end of the name; bad idea I thought since they had a good name already. All the major players have a dual controller SAN that would fit that budget, and that's generally cheaper than two freenas boxes mirrored just because of the disk costs.

Interested in the guest/product as it needs PCIe access, more info would give us a better understanding of any specialised I/O profile.

@paulsolov, @andyalder: they always be MSAs in my eyes, like I keep referring to DEC/Compaq to my clients, and they keep asking me who! One day, I'll get with the program one day soon!

You probably remember a Dwizza on a chip getting called Doc :)

I wish there was a MSA1000 G3 - a simple dual controller SAN box made from a couple of Smart Arrays (or at least the intellectual property on them) tied together on a PCI bus like two controllers in a chassis without the CPU but they dropped that design and went for Dot Hill.

For a starter kit the HP P2000 is not bad, Dell Equalogic has a decent pricepoint, Netapp with base license will get you iscsi and potential to grow into CIFS and all the other goodies it offers.

@andyalder: I do, I loved the HSG80 as well.

c'mon guys..pretty soon you'll be talking about 286DX..scratch that..286SX with a math coprocessor.

@paulsolov: it was a 80286 and 80287 maths coprocessor, and 80386dx, 80386sx ....... ill stop now. go back a bit before then!

Let's help the with the SAN questions and I'll promise not to get back on my Commodore 64.

IBM will still resell it just like they do the N series.

I mentioned the Netapp low end which is the FAS2000.  Right now they're getting the 2020 and 2050 off the shelf because it doesn't support the latest greatest ontap but will still be a viable system for many small installs.

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