Configuration for a two machine ESXi cluster using VSA to present local storage to VMs
- by MDMarra
I'm designing a little vSphere 5 cluster for one of our remote sites. We have some IBM x3650s that have 6x 300GB 10K RPM drives in them, along with dual quad core CPUs and 24GB RAM. Because we use HP P4500 G2s at our primary site, we have licenses available for HP P4000 VSAs. I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to use them.
Below is a basic drawing of what I want to accomplish:
I want to run a P4000 VSA on each server and run them in a Network RAID-10 (Lefthand speak for network mirroring, think of it as RAID 1 across nodes or as an active/active storage cluster). I will then present this storage to guests that will run on this mini-cluster. It will be managed by a vCenter Server on our main site.
All connections will be GbE with two dedicated to storage. Management and Data will share a pair of connections, since I don't expect there to be high load. These servers are just there to provide directory services, dhcp, printing, etc.
Does anyone see anything potentially wrong with this approach? Is this the best way to do this without adding additional dedicated storage heads? Are there any pitfalls in this design, besides the lack of dedicated Data/Mgmt interfaces?