On 2012-06-22 12:04 AM, Matthew Marlowe <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Tanstaafl<[email protected]> wrote:
I could get 2 of these for each server, each with a mirrored pair of CF (or
SD) cards (mirror mode is defined by a jumper or switch on the adapter),
then mirror those (in the BIOS), which would result in a total of FOUR CF
(or SD) redundant cards (a mirror of 2 mirrored pairs) for the hypervisor...
and I can do this for quite a bit less than even a SINGLE 146GB SAS drive...
Is there any reason NOT to do this?
If you have a small ESX cluster, there are numerous advantages to
having some local storage on each your ESX hosts in addition to your
primary SAN storage:
We actually will be using ONLY local storage... Dell R515's with 8 450GB
SAS drives in RAID10 (with one hot spare assigned)...
A decent SAN wasn't in the budget (yet, but we may go that route in a
year or two)...
- Lastly, I never really have been a fan of ESXi as an upgrade from
ESX.....seems that it was more driven by vmware making windows admins
feel more confident since they didn't have to learn linux for ESX
console.
This is a new install, so not an 'upgrade'...
But, there is nothing keeping you from getting mirrored CF/SD cards
for the hypervisor boot and also keeping a few mirrored 2TB SATA
drives on each host for local datastores (7200rpm SATA is much cheaper
than 15K rpm SAS).
I do plan on having a couple of large SATA drives in RAID0 (for speed)
for temporary snapshots (which I then backup using rsnapshot or my VM
backup s/w) and for if I ever need to add some drives to my RAID10
(probably won't, the 1.7TB I'll have is 4 times what we have now which
is only 70% utilized)...
I get the CF cards today (already have the adapters), so we'll see how
this goes this weekend...
