Advice needed for small business SAN

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deajan
Posts: 53
Joined: 2009/08/01 12:49:42
Location: South France
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Advice needed for small business SAN

Post by deajan » 2015/03/21 00:04:30

Hello,

I am aiming to make a high availability SAN from two small servers with each a RAID 1 array.
My thought was using GlusterFS, creating a device which i then export as iSCSI targets on both machines, maybe even using multipath to enable higher traffic through multiple NICs.
From there, i would use keepalived or heartbeat to configure the iSCSI portal as a virtual IP, and connect my iSCSI intiator on both targets as multipath (or 4 targets if i also happen to use multipath on the SAN servers).

I aim to have an active-active SAN, to put some virtual machines on it.
Is that setup okay ?

As of my understandings, glusterfs does replication at file level, not block level. Does this mean that a 500Gb iSCSI target file containing VM's will get fully synced everytime a write happens in that file ? In that case, it cannot be used as iSCSI target for virtualization.

I've read alot about DRDB and ceph too, but the first one handles active-passive only, and the latter one needs 3 servers minimum.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Regards,
Ozy.

deajan
Posts: 53
Joined: 2009/08/01 12:49:42
Location: South France
Contact:

Re: Advice needed for small business SAN

Post by deajan » 2015/03/23 10:36:50

Well, some news:

Gluster is file level and not block level (so basically it's NAS and not SAN), but it does granular file locking, so you basically can use it as a cheap SAN alternative.
I didn't find any easy cheap SAN software that does handle an active-active scenario yet.

I've setup a mdraid setup which i sync via gluster, and export via iscsi (lio).
For better iscsi performance, i use multipath.

Now the question is, can i use keepalived to switch both multipath adresses at the same time from one node to another....

Any advices are welcome :)

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