Skip to main content

storage - What are the options for attaching DAS units greatly exceeding 62TB Virutal Disks max size limit on vSphere 6.0/6.5?

Our new DAS unit is on the horizon and I'm looking for the best way to configure the storage.



We currently use vSphere 6.0 but will have to upgrade to 6.5 when Update 1 is released as all HDDs in the new DAS are 512e (sector size is 4096 emulated as 512) which is only supported in 6.5.



The total capacity of two Dell MD1280 (populated with 10TB HDDs) will greatly exceed 64 TB max size of Datastore, many times. Depends on the number of hard drives we decide to use/buy.



Initially I thought about creating multiple Virtual Disks in iDRAC




RAID5 -> 7 x 10TB = 60TB with 1 drive failure



Then create Datastore and Virtual Disks with vCenter and then span them with LVM on the VM (all VMs are Linux)



This is the same and only option I was given by DELL VMWare tech support.



The problem here is that if I fully populate the both units, I would lose 24 drives (240TB) for parity and still only one of them can fail per each Virtual Disk.
Any other RAID level only adds to the loses.



I used RDM approach (mounting physical(VDs from iDRAC) drives on VMs) in the past while running vSphere on a Free licence to work around max 4TB Virtual Disk size. I wonder if that would work and what would be the possible downsides of this approach, if it works on this scale.




I know I might be forced to do this outside of VMWare and be able to just span all HDDS into a huge array with multiple parity disks but wanted to ask if anybody has some word of wisdom in this subject. Details of this approach should probably be discussed in a separate question, if there isn't one already.



Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

linux - Awstats - outputting stats for merged Access_logs only producing stats for one server's log

I've been attempting this for two weeks and I've accessed countless number of sites on this issue and it seems there is something I'm not getting here and I'm at a lost. I manged to figure out how to merge logs from two servers together. (Taking care to only merge the matching domains together) The logs from the first server span from 15 Dec 2012 to 8 April 2014 The logs from the second server span from 2 Mar 2014 to 9 April 2014 I was able to successfully merge them using the logresolvemerge.pl script simply enermerating each log and > out_putting_it_to_file Looking at the two logs from each server the format seems exactly the same. The problem I'm having is producing the stats page for the logs. The command I've boiled it down to is /usr/share/awstats/tools/awstats_buildstaticpages.pl -configdir=/home/User/Documents/conf/ -config=example.com awstatsprog=/usr/share/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl dir=/home/User/Documents/parced -month=all -year=all...

iLO 3 Firmware Update (HP Proliant DL380 G7)

The iLO web interface allows me to upload a .bin file ( Obtain the firmware image (.bin) file from the Online ROM Flash Component for HP Integrated Lights-Out. ) The iLO web interface redirects me to a page in the HP support website ( http://www.hp.com/go/iLO ) where I am supposed to find this .bin firmware, but no luck for me. The support website is a mess and very slow, badly categorized and generally unusable. Where can I find this .bin file? The only related link I am able to find asks me about my server operating system (what does this have to do with the iLO?!) and lets me download an .iso with no .bin file And also a related question: what is the latest iLO 3 version? (for Proliant DL380 G7, not sure if the iLO is tied to the server model)

hp proliant - Smart Array P822 with HBA Mode?

We get an HP DL360 G8 with an Smart Array P822 controller. On that controller will come a HP StorageWorks D2700 . Does anybody know, that it is possible to run the Smart Array P822 in HBA mode? I found only information about the P410i, who can run HBA. If this is not supported, what you think about the LSI 9207-8e controller? Will this fit good in that setup? The Hardware we get is used but all original from HP. The StorageWorks has 25 x 900 GB SAS 10K disks. Because the disks are not new I would like to use only 22 for raid6, and the rest for spare (I need to see if the disk count is optimal or not for zfs). It would be nice if I'm not stick to SAS in future. As OS I would like to install debian stretch with zfs 0.71 as file system and software raid. I have see that hp has an page for debian to. I would like to use hba mode because it is recommend, that zfs know at most as possible about the disk, and I'm independent from the raid controller. For us zfs have many benefits, ...