Migrate Vmware cached iSCSI (Netapp) storage to Proxmox

[theuken]

We're currently preparing to migrate our Vmware environment to Proxmox.
The bulk of our storage is based on large Netapp iSCSI targets (multi-path) using Virtucache on the ESXi hosts (SSD cache read/write) to accelerate.
Performance, stability & reliability is excellent.

Now the question is how we can implement this with Proxmox (ZFS over iSCSI ?) keeping the existing Netapp SCSI storage and - most important - the SSD cache.
Rebuilding the storages with a new FS and moving the data would be possible.
Unfortunately Virtunet Systems still hasn't realized that they're riding a dead horse, so there won't be a Virtucache port for Proxmox.

Any ideas & suggestions are very welcome !

 

[bbgeek17]

Hi @theuken , welcome to the forum.

Now the question is how we can implement this with Proxmox (ZFS over iSCSI ?)

You cant. Netapp is not a suitable target for ZFS/iSCSI scheme.

I am not familiar with Virtucache, so cant provide any advice there.

The out-of-the-box solution is to use LVM with iSCSI. You may find this article helpful for that: https://kb.blockbridge.com/technote/proxmox-lvm-shared-storage/

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[Heracleos]

Short answer: No, you can't.
Long answer: It depends.
From what I remember, Virtucache is a piece of software that runs on ESXi hosts, and it is not a NetApp product. It uses local SSDs on the vmware nodes to cache volumes, and therefore also NetApp, but not only.
If you remove VMware from the nodes, the SSDs used for caching should be seen as normal SSDs, so you maybe could format them and use for ZFS or something else.
As for NetApp storage, since it's iSCSI, i think, you won't be able to mount VMFS volumes on Proxmox nodes.
Using ZFS on an iSCSI volume, somehow mounted on a VM, and then exposing it as NFS to the Proxmox hosts, while probably possible, i am not sure if it is supported, and seems complicated to me.
You will probably need to remove the VMFS volumes and work with LVM.
Basically, I think you will have to move all the VMs to other storage, delete the old VMware volumes on nodes and netapp storage, build the whole proxmox cluster and storage, and migrate the vmware VMs.
It seems like a lot of work to me, and not exactly painless.

 

[theuken]

Correct - Virtucache use a local SSD on an ESXi host as a cache (read & write) for iSCSI targets (in our case on Netapp).
The cache is basically transparent to the ESXi host and the cached iSCSI storage is of course a vmfs volume.
It's perfectly clear that we'll have to migrate the data on these volumes as well as the VMs to Proxmox & different file systems.
I'm looking for an equivalent solution (local SSD cache for an iSCSI Netapp target) with a read & write cache which is at least transparent to the VMs.
This is about read & write latency / performance.

 

[Heracleos]

I'm not experienced enough with Proxmox, but I doubt there is an equivalent solution.
iSCSI is managed with LVM volumes, not as a shared file system, and I don't think there is a way to use local node disks as cache for LVM.
At least not something that is natively supported by Proxmox.
If it were possible, I think you should use SSDs, mounted directly on the NetApp as Flexcache, in which case the cache becomes completely transparent to Proxmox.

 

[bbgeek17]

Hi @theuken
There aren’t many solutions like this because, in principle, it shouldn’t be necessary if you have modern, fast storage.

I completely understand wanting to maintain your existing deployment model similar to VMware. However, I don’t think you’ll find anything comparable because, with the advent of NVMe, that approach has largely run its course.

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox