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I have two servers (Intel Xeon) with running ESXi on them. There are about 70 clients in the network (16 thin clients among them). We've got pretty large data storage (it's about 100TB). We're using Exchange 2010 CCR and SQL DB with critical data. We`re planning to use tape device for backup.

What iSCSI target supports High Availability for my project?

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  • Cleaned up your post and made the title "more better".
    – Joseph Kern
    Oct 16, 2009 at 11:07

5 Answers 5

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We are using LeftHand units and SANIQ to provide HA iSCSI targets for our ESX cluster.

http://www.compaq.com/storage/highlights/lefthandsans.html

Works very well but is pretty expensive.

We are however looking forward to HA-iSCSI in OpenSolaris using ZFS becoming an option. That would allow us to keep the same functionality and reduce the cost of the hardware and software licensing. We would however lose the LeftHand GUI that some prefer.

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  • +1 for Lefthand. We have an HA pair that store our Xen virtual machines as well as some volumes that are reshared over AFP and NFS by Mac OS X Servers.
    – lukecyca
    Oct 16, 2009 at 20:19
  • Check out NexentaStor then - the free version is limited to 12Tb, but the rest of the options aren't bad
    – dyasny
    Apr 23, 2010 at 16:43
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To J.Zimmerman: I know that ZFS is really cool stuff, but IMHO - in my case this is the same if I would use hammer to hunt the flies

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If you want an integrated solution you could look at the products from EMC, HP, LeftHand, NetApp or perhaps the IBM N-Series.

If you want to set up a host based solution you could look at OpenFiler (with cluster option) or Windows Storage Server.

Personally I would reccomend a small dual-head EMC Clariion with a mix of s-ata and sas storage.

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If I`ve understood you correct, than my advice to you is to familiarize with table of comparison of iSCSI targets: http://www.nullsession.com/media/iscsitarget/iscsi.pdf

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Who will be accessing this iSCSI storage? The ESXi hosts? The clients? Some other server?

If you'll be using iSCSI to provide storage for the ESXi hosts, then I have a question.

In order to have HA for your iSCSI target, you'll need some kind of shared storage between the servers which will run your iSCSI software (whatever it will be).

Why don't you connect this shared storage directly to the ESXi hosts, then, instead of setting up some server just to act as an iSCSI target?

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    To Massimo: What you are talking about is one machine HA, and I`m considering for shared storage HA.
    – ToreTrygg
    Oct 20, 2009 at 10:43
  • Would direct attached storage provide the same level of redundancy and functionality? Does ESXi support shared direct attached storage?
    – Roy
    Oct 20, 2009 at 11:12
  • ESX/i doesn't support any HA by itself, you need VirtualCenter for it. That said, ESX/i officially supports clustering only with SAN (fiber) and iSCSI storage, but it also works (although unsupported) with physically shared storage such as SCSI or SAS.
    – Massimo
    Oct 20, 2009 at 14:13
  • Does it also support HA with NFS storage?
    – chris
    Oct 20, 2009 at 16:42
  • Of course, sorry for forgetting that.
    – Massimo
    Oct 20, 2009 at 17:40

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