At NetApp we have a long history of cusotmers running application over variuos protocols, and I would have to say from this experience the one to avoid would be CIFS. NFS, iSCSI, or FCP are much, much better options.
Alan McLachlan wrote:
Hi,
Following previous post - I have asked a EMC|VMWare contact about whether using the SMB/CIFS driver referred to in my previous post is supported, is unsupported but won't affect support status on the installation, or is unsupported and also breaks support status.
When I have some feedback I'll post it. As previously stated, NFS is better for a whole range of reasons but some people may wish to put vmdk's on a CIFS share to save paying for an NFS licence.
My only real concern with this would be the state of the CIFS connection after failover in a cluster.
regards,
Alan McLachlan.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Davies,Matt" MDAVIES@generalatlantic.com To: Peter.Learmonth@netapp.com, alanmac@technologist.com, toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: VMware / A-SIS Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 21:48:16 -0000
I was about to ask the same question.....
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com owner-toasters@mathworks.com To: Alan McLachlan alanmac@technologist.com; toasters@mathworks.com toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Sun Oct 28 21:09:20 2007 Subject: RE: VMware / A-SIS
Ummmm.... What ESX CIFS driver?
-----Original Message----- From: Alan McLachlan [mailto:alanmac@technologist.com] Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2007 8:26 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: VMware / A-SIS
Hi Vaughn,
For small environments on a budget where the cost of additional licenses is an issue, you can use RDM's over iSCSI or FCP for both data LUN's _and_ the VM OS images. You still need VMDK pointer files to enable vmotion.
By using RDM's for the VM images you can use lun cloning for R/W snapshots within the same FlexVol, without paying for a FlexClone license and achieve a reasonable level of deduplication without paying for an A-SIS licence. i.e. create "golden images" as source LUNs then use lun clones for the prod, dev, test and backup images of the VM's.
However, for larger environments using vmdk's on NAS from NFS exports or CIFS shares for the VM images is a far more scalable and manageable solution as long as you're happy to pay for A-SIS to manage deduplication. I still wouldn't be putting data volumes inside the vmdk's though.
(Yes, you can use CIFS for vmdk's in ESX. Not as ideal as NFS for a whole bunch of reasons, but it works via the VMWare ESX CIFS driver and useful if you have to have CIFS for file server consolidation and don't want to pay for NFS licencing as well).
Either way, storing your application data in either RDM LUN's or as direct NAS shares makes managing snapshots for dev/test copies and online backups of the production data much simpler to manage. Putting data inside vmdk's limits your functionality particularly for backups.
MSCS requires an RDM for the quorum disk, but you can still use a NAS share for the data if your data profile and application characteristics indicate that it makes more sense to do that than use an RDM for the data.
regards,
Alan McLachlan.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of M. Vaughn Stewart Sent: Sun 10/28/2007 8:07 AM To: Jack Lyons Cc: Page, Jeremy; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: A-SIS questions
FlexClone will clone a datastore, for VM level cloning granularity you gonna have to wait I think something is just around the corner.
As for MSCS you need RDMs as VMDKs are not supported with MSCS
RDMs can be either FCP or iSCSI VMDKs can be on NFS or VMFS (which is over FCP or iSCSI)
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