up vote 0 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I've been cautioned not to create huge LUNs on a SAN (ours is effectively 19TB) but I admit I'm not very knowledgeable about storage issues.

As far as application requirements, I need a 5 TB mount attached to a virtual machine where I can store data. This needs to be physically stored on the SAN. The virtual machine should probably run CentOS.

So, how do I do this? Do I set up RAID on top of multiple iSCSI targets? Is that a bad idea, and if not what does that look like to configure on a Linux box? How do I merge these multiple targets? We use VMWare ESXi 4.1, but I feel like this doesn't offer much benefit for this problem.

link|improve this question
Did you try using RAW disk mapping directly from storage to the VM? – Vick Vega Jan 31 at 5:11
I haven't, no. Does this create a VMDK or something else? I assume I still need a way to "pool" the LUNs? – scott Jan 31 at 5:22
Perhaps I want to use LVM with RDM'ed LUNs? Do I use some sort of RAID configuration with this or does that not make sense? – scott Jan 31 at 5:33
You can create LVM if needed, in case you need to grow the partition. To answer your question - yes, several targets are required and you can stripe LVM across. – Vick Vega Jan 31 at 5:38
And if I don't need to grow the partition? What are other options for spanning the LUNs? – scott Jan 31 at 6:21
show 2 more comments
feedback

Know someone who can answer? Share a link to this question via email, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.