Pointers on shared storage

[dawydiuk]

Hello,

We are currently running 6 esxi hosts, hosting ~20 VMs. Our esxi hosts are very under provisioned... We are looking to migrate to Proxmox(Broadcom shenanigans...), and looking for pointers on SANs that work well with Proxmox for shared storage(VMs hosted on SAN). We're a small business(< 50 employees) so cost is our biggest concern. We would be looking to buy a used SAN although we are required to comply with NIST 800-171 so must have a SAN that we can get security updates on(hoping to find a SAN that is 1-2 generations old so costs are lower but support is still available for several years).

An IT consultant suggested we look at Dell EMC Unity, but from reading through reddit I'm getting the feeling most people don't recommend a Dell EMC Unity SAN with Proxmox... Are there any product lines or features I should be looking for to try to keep costs down on a SAN that works well with Proxmox?

Please keep in mind I have very very little experience with Proxmox and I have no experience with SANs, so if there is a better way to get the benefits of a SAN those recommendations would be greatly appreciated. If this post is way to vague please let me know what I need to read up on to better educate myself so I can pose a better question...

 

[julyat]

just need more information
as you mentioned before you run 6 exsi hosts , so i guess its not a vSAN cluster? correct me if im wrong.
there is still something missing about your workload, you have 20 VMs around but what kind of the bandwidth or iops that we are talking about.
according to your post i recommended that a SAN is not what you looking for
just a simple NAS can do
both SAN and NAS will fit your NIST 800-171 concern, and NAS is much much cheaper in my experience.
and NFS works fine with Proxmox.
i wont recommend you to use CEPH that proxmox provide cos its a little bit sophisticated according to your background.

 

[UdoB]

both SAN and NAS will fit your NIST 800-171 concern, and NAS is much much cheaper in my experience.
and NFS works fine with Proxmox.

Just keep in mind that you get a Single-Point-of-Failure if you don't put some additional effort into it.

We are currently running 6 esxi hosts,

If you will have those 6 machines converted to Proxmox at the end I would like to recommend to read my statement regarding Ceph: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/fabu-can-i-use-ceph-in-a-_very_-small-cluster.159671/

That article aimed to show that three nodes are not good. With 6 machines and some SSDs/NVMe per machine and some (at least two) >= 10 GBit/s networks you would qualify for Ceph - from my personal point of view and without knowing your specific use case.

 

[julyat]

Thanks for mention there is a singe point issue so actually in my situation all the iscsi or nfs services are all coming from a dss to take care of the HA problem.

Just keep in mind that you get a Single-Point-of-Failure if you don't put some additional effort into it.