Re: Openfiler - anyone used it?

["Martyn Wendon" <martynwendon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Paul,

I'm using Netgear GS series smart switches, performance seems OK to me, but
I guess it depends on your specific requirements.  Big switches (costing in
the thousands) tend to have a CPU per port, lower end switches have a CPU
per group of ports - I made sure that I put the VLANs on different port
groups to spread the load.

The VMs using ISCSI run well - they are mainly desktop PCs though (XP) that
I use for specific tasks (e.g. VS2008 development work, Flash development
work), they are on 24/7 but don't get used 24/7 if that makes
sense....Previously I had these VMs running on a 1TB SATA 7200RPM drive
locally in the ESXi box and the performance over ISCSI is infinitely more
snappy - but the RAID0 SAS 15,000 RPM drives and dedicated controller in
the
OF box are responsible for that more than anything :-)

eBay is your friend for great bargains on ex-corporate IT gear that tends
to
be well looked after and run in air conditioned comms rooms.  I picked up
GS716, GS724 and GS748 Netgear switches over the past few years for
£80, £90
and £150 respectively - that's a pretty healthy saving over the cost
of new
ones!  Intel quad port GB Nics come up from time to time (PCI-e), depends
on
how much of a rush you are in!  I've accumulated 5 of those over a period
of
time and have never paid more than £100 or so for each.......again, a
significant saving over the cost of new ones.

I also found that Intel dual port GB Nics can be had pretty cheaply if you
have a machine that can take advantage of PCI-x cards (I use HP ML115
boxes).  I bagged 4 PCI-x cards a while back for £40!


One word of warning if you're going to use ISCSI for VMs - things can go
awfully awry with a Windows install if the ISCSI drive suddenly disappears,
so give consideration to making the OF box as redundant as possible and
don't forget the networking infrastructure in-between the ESXi box and OF
box too!


Hope this helps,

Martyn

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Gale" <groups2@xxxxxxx>
To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 1:11 PM
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Openfiler - anyone used it?


> Ah really interesting - I'm sure I'll have a couple of questions when
I
> think it through a bit more. But a few to start:
>
> I have a managed gigabit switch that can create VLANs etc - never them
> though - can a switch like this share iSCSI traffic and heavy network
> traffic with no performance loss, or do you really need to dedicate a
> whole switch to it for performance?
>
> A VM that boots and runs from the OpenFiler store - is this as good
> performance wise as running from a local single disk (or better -
> obviously depending on what type of h/w the openfiler box is based
on)???
>
> Did you buy your quad port nic's new or ebay etc? - what model?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paul.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
> Martyn Wendon
> Sent: 22 September 2010 20:16
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Openfiler - anyone used it?
>
> Yep, OpenFiler rocks :-)
>
> I have 2 * 2TB WD SATA drives exposed over SMB & NFS and 2 * 300GB
SAS
> 15,000 in Raid 0 on a Dell Perc 5i SAS Raid card exposed over ISCSI.
>
> Box is an HP ML115 AMD Opteron Quad Core with 8GB Ram and a quad port
> Intel Pro GB PCI-e NIC card, 2 ports bonded for ISCSI traffic and 2
ports
> bonded for normal traffic (plus on-board NIC for management traffic).
>
> ESXi boxes using ISCSI for (some) VMs, dual quad port Intel Pro GB
PCI-e
> NIC cards in those too to allow segmentation of ISCSI traffic (as well
as
> bonding for VM traffic).
>
> Needless to say GB switches (Netgear) with appropriate LAGs and VLANs
to
> separate the network traffic....
>
> All works rather well IME.
>
>
> Martyn
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Gale" <groups2@xxxxxxx>
> To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
> Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 3:33 PM
> Subject: [ukha_d] Openfiler - anyone used it?
>
>
>> I'm just thinking about re-arranging my home, HA and work storage.
>>
>> One of my thoughts was to implement an openfiler NAS, connected to
VMWare
>> ESXi VM servers (that I'm already running), rather than the
physical
>> Windows 2008 R2 file server and raid 5 setup I have.
>>
>> Has anyone here setup an openfiler box?
>>
>> Paul.
>>
>>
>>
>> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>>
>>
>>
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