Software SAN vs M3600i

High-Performance Computing Workstations & Servers
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Hi guys,
I hope you’re doing well. We have some XCP-NG servers running in our network and we want to deploy our first SAN in order to allow HA. I’ve been considering two options:

  • 2 x Dell R720xd servers with dual10GB card and 2 x Seagate Exos X20z 18TB each machine and a StarWinds VSAN software
  • 1 x Dell M3600i with dual 2x10GB iSCSI cards with 4 x Seagate Exos X20z 18TB

Which one do you think is a better a better idea (and why if possible) for a SAN which will be used with a XCP-NG cluster.

Best regards,

Salvador

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What are your storage space requirements? I would not run VM’s on spinning rust

IOPS is what you want for VM’s, I would spend a lot more money on flash than the rest of the setup

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Fully agree with FunnyPossum, disk I/O is always the first limit you hit with VMs. HDDs will slow your VMs to a crawl as they try to serve the conflicting requests of multiple VMs wanting to read/write data to/from different parts of the disk at the same time. And note you don’t want just any SSDs, you want to make sure you check the spec sheets to get the highest read & write speeds/IOPS, and then still check benchmarks to check for sustained write speeds as well.

If you’ve never dealt with SAN equipment before, you’re in for a slap in the face. It’s not nearly as open and straight-forward as servers. You’ll probably find you can’t get the MD3600i up and working. A safer way to start with SANs is buying a fully working unit with drives installed (in a configuration that will work for you, as-is). Then in your testing you can play around with putting 3rd party drives into it, and find out it won’t take them, then go back to the drives it came with.

Then again, maybe I should ask why you want an iSCSI SAN in the first place. XCP-ng docs recommend NAS over SAN storage “because it’s easier to deal with.” NFS servers are certainly easy to setup.

Since you’re interested in StarWinds VSAN software, why not buy one of their hardware appliances and get a known-working and supported solution?

You should be very careful here, it really sounds like you should be hiring an experienced professional to help because you’re at serious risk of either wasting a lot of money, destroying the performance of your (presumably important) systems, or even losing all your data.

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