MSA500 G2/SCSI with two ESX-servers

[Massimiliano Rizzi]

Hi,

We are planning to use MSA500 G2/SCSI with two ESX 3.0.2-servers with default 2-port io-module. MSA 500 G2/SCSI is not on the VMware HCL but our customer asked us to setup a cost-effective solution. We are planning to boot from the onboard sas controller installed on each ESX host using 36gb raid 1 array and to create a shared raid 10 lun on MSA500 G2 to avoid wasting disk space. We are planning to use ESX server Starter Edition. I have read some of the posts published about MSA500 G2/SCSI with ESX server and seems to work well. What about sharing disk between ESX-servers when both ESX hosts are running VMs sharing the same VMFS ? Correct me if I'm wrong VMFS has a lock on the VM files so the other ESX host cannot update them right ? What is the configuration to enable MSA500 G2 lun sharing ?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give

Have a nice week!
Massimiliano

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

If as you say the "MSA 500 G2/SCSI is not on the VMware HCL" then I wouldn't go there...

You may be able to get it to work, but if you do run into problems then getting support will be difficult...

Cheers,

Rob

[Uwe Zessin]

> What is the configuration to enable MSA500 G2 lun sharing ?

You need to present the logical disk(s) to both servers.

Whether the MSA500 properly deals with VMware ESX Server's SCSI reservation requests, well that is unknown. The starter edition might not even issue them, because it is not licensed for shared 'SAN' environments. If that is true, you risk damaging your VMFS volume(s)!