C7000 Blade access to the SB600c storage

[dbx13]

Hello,

We have a new C7000 with 5 x BL460 G6 servers, an SB600c Storage Blade, and two Flex-10 10GBe modules. We plan to use Server 2008 R2 on the BL460's to host HyperV guests.

1. How do I configure the SB600c so that all other blade servers can access its storage?

2. Assuming point 1 is possible, can I boot the guest servers off the SB600c storage blade? That is, store the Virtual Hard Drives on the SB600c and boot from that storage?

Thanks again for any input!

[Steven Clementi]

1. Only the server directly to the left of the actual storage blade can access the disks directly.

That being said, and I am not a Hyper-V expert (no real experience at all really).. I would assume that you can access a Windows Share off of the Storage Server, or perhaps there is a way to share the storage out via iSCSI.


2. Assuming you can access the storage from all of the other servers, then yes... you should be able to boot guest servers from it.


Steven

[David Claypool]

You could use the "Virtual SAN Appliance" software in a Hyper-V VM to serve up iSCSI block storage that could be accessed by other blades in the enclosure: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/vsa/index.html

[Igor Karasik]

1. The real power of Hyper-V R2 cluster - in using CSV (shared storage volumes). These volumes maybe only iSCSI or FC volumes, NAS (or windows share) will not work
Therefore the only solution in your environment maybe Virtual SAN Appliance as David write (but I have not any expirense with Virtual SAN Appliance,
we use HYPER-V cluster on BL460 G6 servers with NetApp storage (CSV access via iSCSI))

2. Assuming you use Virtual SAN Appliance or something that get you iSCSI/FC volume - yes, you will be able to boot guests from storage

[dbx13]

Hi David, the P4000 VSA appliance looks like it would do the job, but maybe overkill, a little complicated for managing the 6 x 300GB drives on the SB40c blade.

Igor, the NetApp looks good too but wouldn't go in favour of an HP solution as we try to stick to HP whenever possible.

Then, using the All-in-One Storage Manager on the SB600c, it should be possible to develop an iSCSI SAN? Install MS iSCSI initiator on the other blades? Or, do they need an HP-based initiator...

[Steven Clementi]

I don't recall if they included the functionality to be a "target" storage device in an iSCSI SAN. I am almost sure they did not.

With that said, you can still use the VSA. You would need software to run on the Storage Blade that you can run the VSA on. Microsoft and Vmware both have products to do this.

If you do not need the other functionality of the SB600c...then your other options are...

1. Setting up Hyper-V on the storage Blade itself... it will have direct access to the storage. Then you can run the VSA on the blade with minimal overhead due to other Microsoft and/or 3rd party services.

2. Install ESXi would allow you to do the same thing.. but then you have 2 different environments to manage.


Steven

[dbx13]

We worked through using the AiO Storage Manager on the SB600c to "Host a User-Defined Application" in order to carve out LUNs and present them on an iSCSI network. Using the MS iSCSI Initiator on the member blade servers, we were able to connect to those targets and having moved the HyperV VHD's to the LUNs were able to boot from that storage.

Everything you need to create an iSCSI network and offer LUN storage to the blade servers in the C7000 is contained on the SB600c.

Thanks to everyone for your input!