I've been considering building a SAN based disk array using Comstar for some virtualization hosts that will be used for live migration between them on Xen (initially there will be just 2, but this will probably grow), the questions I have are:
1. As far as drive alignment goes, is there any specific offset that I should be using on either the Virtualization host, the San, or the virtual instance (Some will be windows server & others will be various flavors of *nix) if I were using iSCSI between the San & the Virtualization Hosts? 2. If I start out with an arbitrary amount of disks in the San (well say 12 for the purposes of this discussion), are there any caveats/issues with adding additional drives going down the road (like an additional 12 later, or some here & there?) 3. I was thinking of using a GbE switch specifically dedicated to the interconnect between the San & the virtualization hosts, but I've read that can be a not so good idea since ethernet is lossy. If at this stage of the game I only had these 3 hosts (2 Virtual's & the San) on this switch and the workload of the production virtual instances were middle of the road -Would this iSCSI configuration cause noticeable issues ? If I were to go with Infiniband, are there any HBA's & Switches that do *NOT* do well with Comstar ? 4. I hear that there is some work in progress for Dedup ? Is there any sort of a timeframe for when this feature should be available ? Are there any preliminary metrics on typical savings with consumed storage ? 5. I hear that availability suite is capable of doing scripted replication of one comstar host to another, if I only had AVS traffic running during certain times of the day across T1 Business class IP connectivity, and production instances typically had 100mb of change or less per day -About how long of a daily replication cycle would be expected per iSCSI target ? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
