Questions before installing

[m.vienne]

Hello everyone,
I have three unused PowerEdge R710 and two San EMC VNX5100 on my array. They worked on an old version of Vsphere, but they aren't used anymore for three years. I wish to give them a second life for my students and to have a consequent storage sharing.
These are my questions :
Should I install PVE first, create my cluster and after power on VNX, solve multipath and use CephFS ?
Or should I power on everything at once and made conf on installation ?
I'm not sure of what to do. Any help will be appreciated.
Thx.

 

[bbgeek17]

Hi @m.vienne, welcome to the forum.

It does not matter in which order you will power on your systems. During the installation PVE only cares about available local disks to place the core software there. No external storage pools are configured.

You will need to confirm VNX connectivity and multipath configuration after you are done with PVE cluster. Whether the disks are visible by the OS prior to that - does not matter.

Using Ceph on Multipath attached SAN is not what Ceph was designed for. One can do it but likely shouldn't.

You should use your VNX as shared iSCSI or FC attached storage with LVM on top of it. This would be the most simple configuration for a beginner.
As it doesn't sound like this system is going into critical production, you can always re-install when you get more familiar with the functionality.

Experimenting is the best way to learn.

---

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

 

[m.vienne]

Hi @bbgeek17, thank you. For all. Particularly about Ceph. I will try with iSCSI so. And we will see after.

 

[dhcolesj]

I'm not against CEPH (just not a FAN unless you have a lot of local storage you want to use for low end workloads/iso storage/backups), but if you have Fibre attached SAN and you want to use Shared storage LVM is the way to go. It'll provide the best performance and keep your IP network from handling storage tasks. If you do CEPH and/or iSCSI I would encourage a separate IP network for that to sync / access disk.

 

[waltar]

I have three unused PowerEdge R710 and two San EMC VNX5100 on my array. They worked on an old version of Vsphere, but they aren't used anymore for three years. I wish to give them a second life for my students and to have a consequent storage sharing.

I would group your students into 3 groups (each 1 server with access to both EMC's) and each experiment on 1 or 2 individual solutions (lvm, lvm-thin, iscsi, local fs+nfs, ceph, gluster, gfs2, ...) for lots of experience and later decision.

Do nested virtualization so that each R710 has 3 pve vm's as virtual cluster for each group, and passthrough the emc volumes to that.