Dell MD3600i iSCSI SAN (ZFS over iSCSI)

SteveAllen

Member
Jun 20, 2011
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Hello

I'm reaching out to this community as I'm just starting out with Proxmox and could do with some advise.

Does anyone have any experience of using a Dell MD3600i SAN with a Proxmox cluster?

We are very early in the planning stage and we are trying to do the best possible setup with existing hardware. We have 2 physical servers and a Dell MD3600i iSCSI SAN. The physical servers have 6 1Gig network ports so we are dedicating 2 ports on each server to the storage network.

We plan on clustering the 2 servers to enable live migration and we want to storage the VMs on the SAN. We also want to use multi-path for improved performance and redundancy.

Looking at the different file system types in the Proxmox documentation it looks like ZFS over iSCSI seems to be a good option because it gives snapshots.

I'm unsure if this will work with the Dell SAN because I can not find anything related to ZFS support on this SAN. Does the SAN need to support ZFS or is this purely something that the Proxmox server manages?

Any general advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
 
First: You cannot have a HA cluster with only 2 nodes. It requires at least 3 nodes. But without HA it is doable.
Second: ZFS over iSCSI requires support for ZFS on the storage node and a proxmox plugin supporting the specific OS on the storage node.
Third: Dell MD3600i does not support ZFS so your only options are either LVM on exposed LUN's from the SAN or attaching LUN's as local disks on the node and create a file system for Qcow2 (local ZFS is also possible) or LVM-thin.
 
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First: You cannot have a HA cluster with only 2 nodes. It requires at least 3 nodes. But without HA it is doable.
Second: ZFS over iSCSI requires support for ZFS on the storage node and a proxmox plugin supporting the specific OS on the storage node.
Third: Dell MD3600i does not support ZFS so your only options are either LVM on exposed LUN's from the SAN or attaching LUN's as local disks on the node and create a file system for Qcow2 (local ZFS is also possible) or LVM-thin.

Thanks Mir. I did some testing today using LVM onto of iSCSI and so far it's looking good.
 
LVM over iSCSI is the old proven way which has been stable for years. Only limitation is that you don't have support for shapshots.
Am i right in thinking the limiting for performing live Snapshots?

I did a few test backups and they worked fine with the mode as snapshot instead of suspend. Is that "normal"
 
I have set this up with both Proxmox servers accessing the same LUN on the iSCSI SAN via multi-path.

Is this the safe recommend way to do it?

How does Proxmox know not to overwrite each of the VMs data on the LUN?

What controls the data writing to the SAN?
 

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