Showing posts with label IP SAN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IP SAN. Show all posts

Monday, December 5, 2016

Generic Storage System Architecture


The above diagram shows a generic stand-alone storage system architecture, where a storage OS is installed over a bare metal server and thus making it a storage server. Here I am using an enterprise class storage OS named Open-E DSS V7 which is installed on a Dell PowerEdge R720xd. R720xd can have up to twelve 3.5" drives at the front plus two 2.5" drives at the rear. Here in the diagram, the last 2 disks (Disk Group03) are 2.5" drives installed at the rear and being used as OS drive in RAID1. Apart from that we have five SAS 7.2K and 15K disks that are grouped into two RAID groups. Comparing the disk IOPS 'Disk Group01' can be considered fast and 'Disk Group02' as slow.

As I haven't mentioned the size of each SAS disk, lets assume using 'Disk Group01' a 10TB RAID5 virtual disk (VD) is created and using 'Disk Group02' a 12TB RAID5 VD is created. You can configure hot spares for each disk group if you have additional disks. As I mentioned above, for OS installation we have created a 10GB RAID1 VD using 'Disk Group03'. After installation of the OS (Open-E DSS V7), it scans and shows 10TB and 12TB as available storage units. 

Now the next step is to create volume groups. Here we created two volume groups (VG00 and VG01) to differentiate fast and slow storage. 

  • VG00 uses VD01
  • VG01 uses VD02
Once volume groups are created, you can now carve out LUNs separately based on your requirements. For example, if you want a LUN that is going to be used as a datastore to store your virtual machines, then you can create it on VG00 (fast), or if you need it for storing some general purpose backup files, then you can create it on VG01 (slow). So depending on your requirement you can decide where to create your LUN.

Note: Here I classified RAID disk groups based on speed. You can divide it based on reads and writes. So that you can choose RAID10 disk group for write intensive operations and RAID5 disk group for reads. It can even be divided based on access type. That means a disk group exclusively for sequential file access (SQL logs) and another disk group for random access (SQL data, VM datastore etc). 

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Implementing storage cluster - Open-E DSS V7 Active-Passive iSCSI SAN Failover Cluster

The setup that I used for this implementation is mentioned below :

-Two DELL PowerEdge R710 servers (ESXI01 and ESXI02)
-Implemented Open-E DSS V7 Active-Passive iSCSI Failover Cluster – using two VSA’s running on different ESXI 5.5 hosts
  • Created VM and installed Open-E Node A on ESXI01
  • Created VM and installed Open-E Node B on ESXI02
  • Configured separate network interfaces for heartbeat, volume replication and WEB GUI management
  • Configured a vSwitch on both ESXI hosts (ESXI01 and ESXI02) 
  • Added direct point-to-point connection between the above two ESXI hosts for reliable volume replication
  • Configured iSCSI volumes and targets on Node A and Node B
  • Configured replication task
  • Configured failover cluster with multiple auxiliary paths
  • Configured virtual target IP address
  • Added target to cluster
  • Configured iSCSI initiator
  • Tested failover and failback functions successfully

Note :
Detailed configuration guide is given in Open-E website itself

Implementing HA storage cluster - Open-E DSS V7 Active-Active Load Balancing iSCSI HA SAN cluster

The setup that I used for this implementation is mentioned below :

-Two DELL PowerEdge R710 servers (ESXI01 and ESXI02)
-Implemented Open-E DSS V7 Active-Active iSCSI HA SAN Cluster – using two VSA’s running on different ESXI 5.5 hosts
-In Active-Active mode, both nodes of the cluster will simultaneously run volumes providing high availability of data
-Overall cluster performance will be improved compared to Active-Passive mode since the read, write and replication traffic can be balanced on both nodes

-Open-E cluster nodes :
  • Node A1 on ESXI01 
  • Node B1 on ESXI02 
  • Configured separate network interfaces for heartbeat, volume replication and WEB GUI management
  • Added direct point-to-point connection between the above two ESX hosts for reliable volume replication
  • Configured iSCSI volumes and targets on Node A1 and Node B1
  • Configured replication tasks and failover cluster with multiple auxiliary paths
  • Configured virtual target IP address and added targets to cluster
  • Started cluster

Note :
Detailed configuration guide is given in Open-E website itself

Configuring iSCSI volume using Open-E DSS V7