I've been by here as a lurker a few times in the past, and have found it nothing but helpful, now I have a question of my own.
I'm charged with creating a VM cluster solution and have been looking into the MD3000(i) series DAS/iSCSI storage. I currently have 2 PowerEdge 1950s that I can hook up to a MD3000 via PERC5 SAS HBAs. However, and this is the tricky part, I want to create a Clustered or High Availability Disk that is accessible over the network.
One way I can see doing this is to divide up the MD3000 into a few LUNS, use one to create a clustered VM and then Connect another LUN as a pass-through disk to that VM, which can then "share" that disk via an iSCSI target. However I do see a few pitfalls in here, if the VM is Active/Passive I only get the benefit of using 1 HBA to handle IO. Additionally I am weary of performance overhead that may be introduced by using a VM to Manage the SAN Disk.
Are these concerns Justified? Can the VM even successfully fail over and still communicate with the Pass through disk?
Another option that seems far simpler is to just pick up a MD3000i instead and just set it up as an iSCSI target using my 1950s to manage it. The only reason I am think of alternatives is because I am concerned that the 1 Gigabit Ports on this unit will create a bottleneck.
I realize that if I'm looking for a super high performance SAN solution then probably the MD3000 series isn't the way to go but I am looking for an reasonably priced solution to cluster 5-6 Low/medium Utilization VMs (around 60iops each, ~90% writes).
I don't mind "out of box" thinking to come up with a solution but I do need to be able to support more original thinking with documentation.
Thanks in advanced for any thoughts.