Infrastructure for redundant NAS?

E

eg1l

Guest
Hi,

My company is discussing using Proxmox for virtualization. I personally love it, but I need some input on the infrastructure part.
Today we have 5 Dell servers, Xeon 3.0GHz with 16GB RAM. We are thinking about purchasing two NAS.
My idea was to use two GBit network interfaces on each NAS, and one on each host.

We need:
  • Redundant NAS, if one NAS goes down, virtual machines won't.
  • HA
  • RAID monitoring

Is this setup possible? Basically, we don't want a single point of failure.
 
I would go for four nics on each host. Two nics for load balance and fail-over storage. The two nics should be put in a bond and the nics connected to two separate managed switches. One nic used for cluster communication and the last nic used for communication to the VM's. All nics could be plugged into the mentioned managed switches provided the nics where isolated on separate vlan's. If you have the economy you could consider replacing the storage nics with 10 Gb interfaces.

If redundancy must be 100% add an extra nic in each host to form a bond for cluster communication.
 
I looked at a similar solution - how are you planning on the HA between the NAS?

I have 5 Dell Servers (3x PE1950s & 2x R415s) - we was running a couple of ReadyNAS boxes but now we are migrating to an MD3200i (Dual Power & Controllers 2x 4x 1GB NICs), it doesnt take much to saturate a single 1GB NIC.

Basically ensure that everything has dual power and network connection that is redundant - looking at 4x 1GB NICs would be a good idea.

Proxmox also advise that any switches you use also supports Jumbo frames - it helps add (in my tests) an extra 5mb/s on HDD IO.

For real HA between the nodes you will also need some form of fencing device.
 
I looked at a similar solution - how are you planning on the HA between the NAS?

That's what I have been wondering about how to do. Is there even a possibility?
Also, a fencing device, would that be a separate server? Would that device need redundancy?
 
That's what I have been wondering about how to do. Is there even a possibility?

Youc an buy HA bolt ons for most SANs - you'd need two identical devices though and the HA/replication add on. If you're buying two ask them to chuck in the bolt on in for free and make sure that its asyscronus for total HA.

Our MD3200i has dual controllers (4GB NICs each) with automated failover and dual PSUs. With our MD3200i - we decided that in the event of a SAN failure we would revert to our ReadyNAS until the MD3200i is back online.

Also, a fencing device, would that be a separate server? Would that device need redundancy?

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Fencing

basically speaking a fencing device will allow you (and the proxmox cluster) to remotely power on/off/cycle/check state of any device plugged into the fence device.

I will have everything on a failover - each machine has 2 power sockets and each socket is connected to a seperate fence device (EATON ePDU) - where devices only have 1 power socket (ReadyNAS) i will use an ATS (Automated Transfer Switch) to keep power to the device incase either side of my grid fails (apart from switches)

UPS1 >>> ePDU1 >>> Server1 PSU1, Server 2 PSU1, Server3 PSU1, ATS PSU1, Switch1, Switch3

UPS2 >>> ePDU2 >>> Server1 PSU2, Server 2 PSU2, Server3 PSU2, ATS PSU2, Switch2, Switch4
 
What kind of network storage would you guys use for this setup, iSCSI + LVM?
Does that man two physical iSCSI targets combined to one LVM?
 

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