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Never used the MSA line-up myself, but have had good experiences with the HPE StoreVirtual SAN Appliances (both physical and virtual). If you run two nodes (you
should) you get network RAID-10 and can do rolling upgrades so you never have downtime.
Have also used a NIMBLE CS300 Been pretty happy with it. Has dual controllers so you can do non-disruptive upgrades as well.
Tegile is another one as well.
Migrating VMs should be super easy. Not sure how it works on Hyper-V but on ESX you just have datastores from both appliances mounted simultaneously and vmotion
the VMs
Zorion Terrell
IT Manager
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DHX Studios
e:
zorion.terrell@dhxmedia.com
t:
604-684-2363
| m:
604-562-5148
600-190 Alexander Street
Vancouver, BC Canada V6A 1B5
From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com [mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com]
On Behalf Of Bruce Dobrin
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2016 1:53 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com
Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Finding a replacement for a Windows Server 2012 R2Hyper-V QNAP iSCSI cluster shared storage array
Were running our 3 x 2 node Hyper-V 2012-r2 clusters on HP MSA 2040 with dual 10G 4-port controllers; connected 2 ports per node, direct attached, spanning the controllers in
MPIO Round-robin. Each node uses 2 dual port Intel X-710 cards, one dual-port card for iScsi and one for the VM client access.
The HP was competitively priced a year ago when we built it and Support has been good the few times we called them, once we navigated the labyrinth of HP support. Performance
seems excellent in our pressure tests on initial setup and in the year since we rolled it out.
Here is a list of ALL of the quirks and issues, NONE of which have been show stoppers
The interface and documentation are typically obtuse as seems to be the norm for HP Enterprise gear, but I cant say its really worse that any other enterprise level equipment.
Im a little worried about firmware updates as they seem to take the NAS completely off-line for the hour per interface that they take. There may be a way around this doing one
interface at a time, but the last time I did it, ( a year ago) I was warned against trying to keep the cluster up while I did this.
Similarly, Im adding another node to one of my clusters right now ( since I have 2 spare interfaces per controller) and adding an IP address to one of the ports on the controller
sends a warning that ALL ports will be brought down during this configuration process, so Im waiting for a time when I can off-line the cluster to actually do this. This could just be a warning per controller or it could be for he entire cluster, but I
dont have the stomach to experiment...
This may or may not be the MSA, butI I get and have always gotten a string of iscsi disconnect-reconnect messages a few times a day on the window side. Ive chosen to ignore these
as seem to be related to a maintenance process somewhere as it usually happens over a 15 min period exactly every 12 hours on each node. None of these errors seem to manifest themselves in any tangible way that I have been able to test as the actually connectivity
has always tested out as remaining solid and constant during these events, and this has happened since day-one. There is some evidence that it is related to a partial failure of one of my Intel iSCSI cards as since that cards very recent replacement,
Ive not seen this particular error. But since this was error was on BOTH nodes, and only one node had a bad card......
As a precaution I have an off-site bare metal DC on the same subnet with enough memory and disk to run all my VMs and then some and I have implemented and tested bi-directional
replication to this. That way if I do need to take the cluster of line for maintenance, none of the VMs need to be off line for more than a minute or so.
-Bruce D.
From:
ddixon
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2016 12:23 PM
To:
studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com
Subject: [SSA-Discuss] Finding a replacement
for a Windows Server 2012 R2Hyper-V QNAP iSCSI cluster shared storage array
|
We are looking at replacing our QNAP TS-EC879U-RP iSCSI storage array that is being used for cluster shared storage in our two node Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V based cluster. Though the QNAP has served our needs well enough,
other than a semi-disastrous firmware update failure of which we fortunately recovered from, the QNAP performed admirably. But, as our needs have grown we feel the need for a more robust cluster shared storage array is needed. Something with more enterprise
level support. Is their a array that anyone out their in "Studio Sys Admins" land feel comfortable in recommending for our needs? Also how do you, and how difficult is it to migrate all of our current vms to the new array and reset up failover on the new
array?
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