Comments on: ESX “SMB” Edition Would Rock

By: Piet Kiekebos

Piet Kiekebos — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:46:10 +0000

I’m running at the moment at virtual appliance OpenFiler. This delivers the iSCSI LUN’s in a test enviroment. It’s for free. With SANmelody Light (datacore.com)a cheap 2T datastorage manager is available. Every physical storage can be deployd as an iSCSI LUN to ESX.
See my simpel running configuration at http://pietkiekebos.fw.nu/VI

By: aharden

aharden — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:50:12 +0000

I’ve had a great experience using NetApp FAS3020Cs with AT disk shelves of 500GB SATA disks as my VI3 clusters’ back-end storage using iSCSI as the transport. Things should improve more when VMware eventually updates the iSCSI initiator to support jumbo frames and MPIO.

By: Erik

Erik — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 08:07:10 +0000

Couple of quick notes. I agree that this would absolutely rock out to have a SAN-less entry point ESX solution.

However there’s lots of movement in the entry-level SAN marketspace (especially with iSCSI built-into the VMKernel this looks really nice) right now, and I’ve deployed a number of them that go head to head with the big guys in terms of real functionality, and much better handling of replication and high availability issues than Mirror View et al. Check out http://www.datacore.com and http://www.compellent.com.

Datacore rocks out for SMBs looking to consolidate and looking at getting better use out of existing storage. Compellent goes further on the intelligent management of data blocks and the roadmap is moving towards VMotion type abilities on the storage side. Very cool players, the two of them.

By: Box293

Box293 — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:39:32 +0000

While a SAN is expensive it’s damn worth the money. I’ve noticed the difference between local disks in servers as apposed to 2GB Fibre Channel disks and it’s amazing. Just installing the OS is so much quicker on the SAN disks.

By: Lode

Lode — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:10:57 +0000

Just a bit of info for the people coming here from planet VMTN: I was one of the two people who presented the SMB edition idea at the TSX contest, and the author of Bladeworld.net.

I have written down our idea at http://bladeworld.net/2007/04/13/vmware-esx-smb-edition/ – feel free to let us know what you think about it.

By: Bladeworld.net

Bladeworld.net — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:39:20 +0000

VMware ESX Small Business edition

During VMware TSX last week in Nice, VMware organised an idea contest regarding “the next big thing” for VMware. Out of all the ideas that were sent in, five ideas were picked by VMware. The five contestants then went on stage to present th…

By: just jon

just jon — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:24:00 +0000

It took me until more than half way (maybe all the way) through before I figured out that SMB didn’t stand for Server Message Block, but instead for Small or Medium sized Business..

jon

By: Mr. Jigglesworth

Mr. Jigglesworth — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:59:37 +0000

A SAN is definitely an expensive solution for VMware. It is something that I had to struggle with for “re-starting” the virtualization project. In addition, you still have other costs that need to be dealt with such as delivering a robust networking solution for ESX servers (you’ll want to be able to have redundant connections to different switches… blah blah blah blah).

If only there were a way to combine the two into something enterprise worthy… hmmmmm… maybe InfiniBand. For someone looking to implement a virtualized solution who can start from scratch, it could definitely keeps infrastructure costs down while delivering a high level of performance.

I’d add InfiniBand to my VMware wishlist.