What are everyone's experience with IBM SANs?

[NateAtNology]

Hi all,

We are starting to make the switch from VMware to Proxmox, but just found out that IBM does not officially support our SAN for use with Debian or Proxmox. We currently use iSCSI in our VMware environment to access the SAN from 3 hosts and about 100 VMs over 25G NICs. The SAN is an IBM FlashSystem 5200 with NVMe drives. It's been working well and the storage has been blazing fast, but with VMware licensing going up, we need to make a change.

• For others with IBM SANs, what has your experience been like with that and Proxmox?
• Any caveats or gotchas to look for?
• Is there any reason to think that this SAN shouldn't work well with Proxmox? I suspect the lack of support is more a matter of "we don't know Debian, so don't want to help" more than "that won't work", but I want to be sure of that.
• What has IBM support been like when using the SAN with an unsupported host?
  • Do they go completely hands off or will they at least try to help a bit?
  • Will they at least help with non-iSCSI matters, like firmware updates or volume/pool issues?

We're nervous about proceeding without full support, but really don't want to have to look at Hyper-V.

Thanks in advance!

 

[bbgeek17]

You may be facing a few challenges when dealing with IBM support in conjunction with PVE, as there are several layers where issues can arise:

• While IBM has performed some interoperability testing with PVE, their storage team may not be as accommodating as their Cloud/Server team once Proxmox is mentioned.
• PVE runs on top of the Debian distribution, which, as you noted, may not be listed on their support matrix.
• PVE uses an Ubuntu-based kernel, which also does not appear on their support matrix.

That said, there is nothing special or proprietary about the PVE kernel from a SAN or Fibre Channel perspective. It is a standard, stable kernel build and should function correctly. Keep in mind that an HBA is also involved. Most HBAs are supported out of the box, while some may require additional drivers, modules, or compilation. It is up to you to verify whether your specific HBA is supported. If it is, you are about 95% of the way there.

I do not have firsthand experience with IBM support, but I would expect that if you can clearly demonstrate a SAN-side issue that is not host-related, they should be willing to assist.

We're nervous about proceeding without full support, but really don't want to have to look at Hyper-V.

That's a business risk decision only your team can make.

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