Looking at purchasing a Dell MD1000 direct attached storage

[evolmar]

Hi all,

We're looking at purchasing a Dell MD1000 direct attached storage unit for a vSphere host at a branch office. The MD1000 will be carved up into different volumes with different RAID levels depending on the application.

My question is when this is plugged into the vSphere host what will it see? Will it see the MD1000 as different volumes of local disk? Do I go in vsphere-configuration-storage tab and choose the add storage option like I would when my boss gives me a LUN from our SAN?

Thanks in advance. I never worked with DAS before let alone DAS with vSphere.

-e

Message was edited by: Troy Clavell - shortened subject

[f10]

Hi Troy,

Well I would first check VMware HCL to see if this product is supported, to my surprise I don't see PowerVault MD1000 as a supported storage for ESX 4.1. You may wanna get back to the reseller to confirm the compatibility.

My question is when this is plugged into the vSphere host what will it see?

Like any other storage, we have RAW disks on the array and you create a volume(RAID) out of it which is presented to the ESX hosts. Yes you have to go to Configuration > Storage Adapters > Select the adapter and confirm if the LUNs are detected. If the LUN's are detected go to Storage > Add Storage and follow the wizard.

Hope this helps :smileyhappy:

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[Dustin Klug]

Evolmar,

To answer your question, yes. Once you configure your raid sets and volumes from the Dell side ( should have supplied host software to do so, or at least a cli ), you will then configure the host mapping topology - ie. assign host w/ hba wwn's and host type ( LNXVMARE ), then you will give each volume a lun number for the host. After this is done ( volumes presented ) you will do a storage adapter scan from the VMware side, then you can add your volumes to VM storage.

-klugmeiser

[evolmar]

Hi Klugmeister,

Does all you have said above still apply even if the host is connected to the MD1000 via SAS?

[Dustin Klug]

Assuming that storage unit is compatible with the version of ESX you plan to use, yes. The process of scanning and adding the lun to ESX is the same. But as f10 suggested, I would go check the HCL compatibility matrix to be sure ( http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php ). I did a few quick checks using 4.0u1 and on and only seen the MD3000 and MD3200 listed.

-klugmeister