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All such questions are a bit dated; I'm hoping things have changed in the past year.

What do you guys use to serve a DRS cluster with vSphere 5.1/5.5?

SCSI-3 persistent reservation support would be definitely needed, VAAI is a nice-to-have.

I've seen that LIO should be able to do it; they do list VAAI as something merged into the kernel (3.14 maybe?), but that won't be available easily on Ubuntu for the time being.

What are your experiences?

The target block devices are already highly available: they are RADOS block devices exported from a ceph cluster.

Zoltan
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    it's definitely not off-topic - I did not seek a product, a service of learning material. LIO is part of the Linux kernel, thus would be a viable option - as is ietd and scst. However, I'm looking for practical experiences. – Zoltan Apr 01 '14 at 18:19
  • Perhaps you should rewrite the question. "Which iscsi target on linux for serving vSphere?" sounds like a request for a product or service. – Michael Hampton Apr 05 '14 at 20:04
  • @Zoltan I'd try them all(?). – ewwhite Apr 05 '14 at 22:04

1 Answers1

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Not many options. Are you sure you need VAAI? If not, QuantaStor and Zetavault are VMware HCL-supported commercial solutions based on Ubuntu. NexentaStor supports VAAI for block and NFS storage.

Reasons you may not see VAAI support for raw Linux installations:

  • Most people seeking solutions with VMware certification and VAAI primitives support typically don't roll-their-own storage.
  • Developing a proper HA clustered storage solution for VMware under Linux isn't easy. There really aren't that many production-quality offerings out there. The demand may not be there either.
ewwhite
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  • the block storage will be ceph's rbd behind it, so the HA part is covered. however, I do need an iSCSI target to export those rbd devices. VAAI would be nice, especially, since on the block storage side, ceph support everything needed in a good storage. – Zoltan Mar 29 '14 at 21:52
  • regarding what you listed: they are complete solutions. I already do have the underlying solution, really looking just for the target implementation to run myself - as stated in the question. – Zoltan Mar 29 '14 at 21:52