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Re: planning vsa

 
pob579
Advisor

planning vsa

Hi,

I am planning to use vsa on mini setup before real transer from old ESX 3.5 will take place.

I need to install 9 VMs right now and up to 10 more "sleeping" servers during next 8 month.

Probably I will go with Hyper-V for budget reason and may whole infrastructure project will go this direction.

For now I want to bring up 2 DL 385 with 6x900GB SAS on each host.

Ideally I would like to have some level of protection with P4000 VSA. Later it will be easier to bring this stuff to physical box.

 

Some questions for people who use it in real life.

 

1.  What is the price for LH VSA? and how it is licenses (per proc? per host?)

2. Is there an internal storage limitation/

3. How internal storages interconnected in cluster? iSCSI? Multiple NICs?

4. What is the experience with VSA?

 

Thanks.

5 REPLIES 5
bryan_hadzik
Frequent Advisor

Re: planning vsa

VSA MSRP is about 5k

One license lets you run one VSA, and most people only run one VSA per physical server

The storage limit is 5 virtual disks at 2TB each = 10TB limit

The VSA access any disk that the hypervisor presents it. It could be local/iscsi whatever.

I have many customers using it successfully for many years.

The biggest thing to remember is performance is directly related to the hardware you put it on. It will technical run on one SATA disk, but that doesn't mean you can run lots of vms on that.

The VSAs can also be clustered together for redundancy.

 

pob579
Advisor

Re: planning vsa

Bryan thanks (sorry for delay :)).

You answered all my questions and I advanced with VSA testing.

 

You mentioned that most of your clients using VSA in 1 host environment.

I see full VSA advantage in a 2 or more Nodes environment (want to test it with Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volume and vSphere).

What people getting from VSA on one host?

Just want to better understand the use of P4000.

 

I will ask some questions related to installation-configuration in other post.

Thanks again.

Michael.

bryan_hadzik
Frequent Advisor

Re: planning vsa

There are many ways to use the VSA. 

At a remote site with one ESX server. The vsa runs on top of it, and all the vms live on that VSA. You can then remote-ip copy that back to HQ

Same thing as above, but doing it with two esx servers for redundancy.

Reclaiming existing storage, or other san vendor for hight capacity storage.

The only variable with the VSA is speed. It runs at whatever speed the underlying disk can handle. Don't expect 10000 iops from a single server with 6 disks.

pob579
Advisor

Re: planning vsa

Bryan, please answer my new questions followed by your answers :)

 

1. At a remote site with one ESX server. The vsa runs on top of it, and all the vms live on that VSA. You can then remote-ip copy that back to HQ

 

> In other words it will provide off site backup? if yes, why not to use just good backup software.

I still have a feeling that the main advantage of using VSA is virtual SAN that could be created with at least 2 hosts. Is it correct?

 

2. Same thing as above, but doing it with two esx servers for redundancy.

 

> In this case you copy running VMs to the standby host? And can start the machines manually if needed?

 

 

3. Reclaiming existing storage, or other san vendor for hight capacity storage.

 

> let say I have 4 years old NetAPP storage. Can P4000 VSA handle it?

bryan_hadzik
Frequent Advisor

Re: planning vsa

1. It can be backup for an entire vm, or a whole set of vms. Its just a different way of doing backups. Also, you can restore entire vms.

2. With 2 ESX servers, and 2 VSAs, you can run network raid 10, so they are always synced. No manual copy required.

3. Yes, it can handle anything that ESX can. Just map ESX to that storage, then present it to the VSA as a virtual disk.