Empty san chassis

[danletkeman]

Hello,

We have a few vmware hosts with a total of about 40 sff sas drives that I was interested in putting into some kind of hardware and making another vsa san.  Any recommendations on a solution that we could use these drives in?

Thanks,

Dan.

[RonsDavis]

I use HP DL360 G5 servers with 6 Gigs of ram and a 2 dual-core CPUs. I picked these up for about $250 on ebay. 

I give the VSA 2 cores, and 4 gigs of ram.

For disk controllers I use an LSI MegaRaid 9280-8e. I then use a SuperMicro SFF JBOD and fill it with all my SAS drives. For a test system you could just do one, for production you would want to make two of them.

The VSA uses a Spanning RAID, so build a large RAID set on the LSI, using all of your SAS drives, and carve off 1.99999 TB Luns off of that.

From a post I saw this weekend it seems that using RDMs may be a bit faster.

Also, I just use the free ESXi on these hosts, since I'll never be snapshotting them, or running an virtual machines besides the VSA.