Options for sharing local storage

[SRhillrom]

I am working with a test environment and familiarizing myself with some of the more advanced options of VMWare.

Right now, in our lab, I have a server that has a ton of direct attached storage. We have a SAN budgeted for the end of this year, but in the meantime, I would like to use that server as a SAN-substitute.

I am looking for the cleanest way to do this under ESXi 5, preferably without spending additional money. We have licenses for VSA, but it appears that I cannot use VSA without more than one server in a cluster - which I do not have. Is there a way to leverage VSA without creating a VSA cluster?

Is there a clean way to do this within the VMWare infrastructure that does not involve using something like FreeNAS or a similar solution, which will end up creating giant VMDK files that I have to deal with? I mean, I could stand up a virtual server with a huge VMDK attached and install one of the software solutions to give me iSCSI targets, but it hardly seems elegant. I could simply install FreeNAS on the bare metal server, but then I lose the use of the server to host virtual machines.

Forgive me if this is elementary - I did some searching first. I'm just looking for a way to use the datastore(s) on this machine for other servers that do not have much storage.

[scottyyyc]

Edit - Not sure I understand the question/setup... So the server that has a ton of local storage is already running ESXi?

"I'm just looking for a way to use the datastore(s) on this machine for other servers that do not have much storage"'

Except for the magic and mirrors behind VSA, ESXi doesn't have the capability to share a local datastore. That datastore needs to live somewhere else and be presented to multiple machines in the way of an NFS share, iSCSI target, or FC LUN.

I was in this same boat about a year ago - a company hired me on for a big VMware project not realizing that shared storage is the key to a VMware setup. They ordered servers with boatloads of physical local storage. Oops. Eventually convinced them that a SAN was the only route (this was also before v5 was released, so no VSA). We've since removed all of the local disks, and have most of them repurposed elsewhere (a dedup backup solution on a physical machine).

[SRhillrom]

Thanks for the response. Sounds like the reason my searching was fruitless is because there's no good answer; I figured there must be a way to leverage VSA for the purpose.

Yes, I have a server that has a ton of local storage and is running ESXi. I don't want to dedicated it completely to a FreeNAS/OpenFiler/etc. machine because it has resources that I want to leverage for virtual machines (memory/CPU). It would be a waste to dedicate a hex-core server w/ 32gb of memory to be only running FreeNAS.

So, the only way that I can see to effectively do this is to create a FreeNAS/OpenFiler/etc. virtual machine, with a giant associated VMDK, and use that VM to publish out iSCSI targets. I am actually in the process of standing up both a FreeNAS and OpenFiler VM to do some comparisons and testing.

[scottyyyc]

Yep, that would more or less be the only option. Keep in mind that individual VMDKs have a limit of 2TB each, so you'd probably have to set up multiple VMDK's, at which point OpenNAS/FreeNAS would detect them as individual disks, and then you could just do a quasi-RAID0 in openNAS. Kind of a cludgy way of going about things, but if you have to share your local storage, its the only option that I know of.

[SRhillrom]

Sounds good.

I find it somewhat strange that they developed something that - in concept - is a really interesting idea. VSA is a great idea.

It seems incredibly handicapped, though, to have this limited to ONLY a storage cluster (vs. an individual server) and to require RAID1 between the servers. Those are great options to have, but are very limiting requirements.

Thanks for the help.