SAN / Fibre Disk Access (?)

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fortechitsolutions

Renowned Member
Jun 4, 2008
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Hi,

I've got a client here looking at prospect of virtualization with 2 new servers. I'm thinking ProxmoxVE might be a great fit, but one concern I'm unclear on: If there is any support / integration option for fibre/san style LUN/disk targets.

Basic platform,
2 x HP servers, each a 4-socket quadcore cpu (16 cores total) with 64gb ram and approx 500Gb local storage (SAS HDDs and HW raid controller)

each server has a fibre HBA connected to a 'small san' (fibre switch)

also to the switch are 2 x disk arrays (approx 7Tb usable capacity per array, to be sliced into a number of LUN/Targets)


From my test deployments with ProxMoxVE, I know that the VMs reside on the 'root filesystem structure' of the server. I'm not sure if there is any way to give access to data/storage capacity on other targets such as we have here.

- in vmware, you can do a kind of san pass-through from physical to virtual machines, as a means to mount SAN based LUNs to virtual machines

- this would be my ideal method: use the local storage for "Virtual machine OS Disk instances" and then use SAN LUNs for data volumes to be mounted/made available to the various virtual hosts.

But I'm not sure this is possible (yet?)

I suspect this would be 'more doable' if the disk arrays were iSCSI based; then it becomes a matter of having second virtual (e1000) nic exposed to VMs and setting up iSCSI initiator in the VM's pointing at the iSCSI targets (iSCSI storage/arrays). But I don't have that hardware here to work with, alas.

Possibly? A way to mount the SAN lun to the location of the virtual machine datastore, and then I create virtual machine images onto the SAN storage in that manner .. ?

Any comments are much appreciated,

--Tim Chipman
Fortech I.T. Solutions
http://FortechITSolutions.ca
 
fortechitsolutions said:
Hi,

I've got a client here looking at prospect of virtualization with 2 new servers. I'm thinking ProxmoxVE might be a great fit, but one concern I'm unclear on: If there is any support / integration option for fibre/san style LUN/disk targets.

Basic platform,
2 x HP servers, each a 4-socket quadcore cpu (16 cores total) with 64gb ram and approx 500Gb local storage (SAS HDDs and HW raid controller)

each server has a fibre HBA connected to a 'small san' (fibre switch)

also to the switch are 2 x disk arrays (approx 7Tb usable capacity per array, to be sliced into a number of LUN/Targets)


From my test deployments with ProxMoxVE, I know that the VMs reside on the 'root filesystem structure' of the server. I'm not sure if there is any way to give access to data/storage capacity on other targets such as we have here.

- in vmware, you can do a kind of san pass-through from physical to virtual machines, as a means to mount SAN based LUNs to virtual machines

- this would be my ideal method: use the local storage for "Virtual machine OS Disk instances" and then use SAN LUNs for data volumes to be mounted/made available to the various virtual hosts.

But I'm not sure this is possible (yet?)

I suspect this would be 'more doable' if the disk arrays were iSCSI based; then it becomes a matter of having second virtual (e1000) nic exposed to VMs and setting up iSCSI initiator in the VM's pointing at the iSCSI targets (iSCSI storage/arrays). But I don't have that hardware here to work with, alas.

Possibly? A way to mount the SAN lun to the location of the virtual machine datastore, and then I create virtual machine images onto the SAN storage in that manner .. ?

Any comments are much appreciated,

--Tim Chipman
Fortech I.T. Solutions
http://FortechITSolutions.ca
Click to expand...

Hi,

as you already assumed, support for multiple data stores including SAN and ISCSI is on the roadmap. we are moving step by step, so we have already some support of ISCSI and FC HBA in our Kernel just to see that we are really moving in this direction :-)
 
Hi Tom, thanks for the quick reply.

Assuming HBA/Fibre is supported presently in the 1.0 release, would it be safe for me to do something like,

-- configure the fibre HBA lun at the OS level / as root via SSH
-- mount this to the path presently used for storing the virtual machine system images (/var/lib/vz)
-- that way, the OS bare data for proxmox lives on the local disk, and the 'bulk data' for system images will all live on the SAN..

Of course, it is a bit silly to have ~500gb local fast SAS raid disk used in this manner (ie, virtually not at all). But maybe the only option for the moment.

I do appreciate that ProxmoxVE is still a young product / under development / with new features on the roadmap. I'm thrilled it has moved so far, so fast though!

Thanks,


Tim
 
fortechitsolutions said:
Hi Tom, thanks for the quick reply.

Assuming HBA/Fibre is supported presently in the 1.0 release, would it be safe for me to do something like,
Click to expand...

depend what HBA you have (vendor/model)

fortechitsolutions said:
-- configure the fibre HBA lun at the OS level / as root via SSH
-- mount this to the path presently used for storing the virtual machine system images (/var/lib/vz)
-- that way, the OS bare data for proxmox lives on the local disk, and the 'bulk data' for system images will all live on the SAN..
Click to expand...

should work, yes.

I theory you can also use any linux hd device as kvm disk - but that is not tested so far.

- Dietmar
 
Hi,

Is there any update re this? Is (fibre-channel) LUN pass-through (from physical host to guest) possible now, and if not, any planned timeframe?

Thanks...

Regards,

David
 
should still work, no issues reported so far.
 
Thanks Tom.
Pardon my ignorance, but is there a detailed set of instructions for setting up a pass-through fibre-channel LUN? I have a fibre-channel array connected to the Proxmox host system, which the host sees as a bunch of devices such as /dev/sdaX (as I recall). I want to pass these through to selected virtual machines so that they can access the "raw" LUNs.

Regards,

David
 
kellydavid said:
Thanks Tom.
Pardon my ignorance, but is there a detailed set of instructions for setting up a pass-through fibre-channel LUN? I have a fibre-channel array connected to the Proxmox host system, which the host sees as a bunch of devices such as /dev/sdaX (as I recall). I want to pass these through to selected virtual machines so that they can access the "raw" LUNs.

Regards,

David
Click to expand...

You can do that on the command line, for example

Code: 
qm set <vmid> -ide0 /dev/sdaX

also see 'man qm'
 
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