RE: [Xen-users] XCP Storage

["Brett Westover" <bwestover@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 9:01 AM, Brett Westover <bwestover@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
 We currently use an iSCSI SAN and VMware ESX, but it provides a lot
of expensive features we don't necessarily need. It's also pretty
complicated, with levels of virtualization in the storage that again, we
don't really need or use.

I'm looking to design a simpler, expandable and hopefully less expensive
storage solution for use with our virtualization platform.

I've been testing with XCP and I like what I see so far, but I have no
idea where to even start with storage.

We'd want to run 2 XCP hosts, running perhaps 30-50 windows and linux
guests. The storage could be directly attached to the hosts, or on a SAN
or a NAS. We'd want a decent level of redundancy in the storage and the
ability to run the VMs on either host.

XCP by default has support for iSCSI initiator but not iSCSI target. I just 
wrote an article on how to add an iSCSI target to XCP 1.1

http://grantmcwilliams.com/tech/virtualization/xcp-howtos/553-creating-an-iscsi-target-on-xen-cloud-platform-11

Maybe not exactly what you're wanting but if it answers a question then great. 

All of my hosts in my cloud are XCP machines so even though I have one that's 
largely a router, firewall, and host for support VMs, (software repositories, 
DHCP, DNS etc) it also acts as an iSCSI target for the other hosts.
Â

Can I get some recommendations on what people are using for this size
environment, and where I should start looking to learn about my options.

Thanks,

Brett Westover


Grant McWilliams
http://grantmcwilliams.com/

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Windows." 
Now they have two problems. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Very nicely written up how-to, thank you for that. I donât think we'd 
necessarily want to use XCP as our iSCSI target though, because we wouldn't 
really have resources left for multi-purposing the storage machine. It's nice 
to know how to do it, if we have a use case for that though.

So, using an iSCSI target for shared storage between our 2-3 XCP hosts would be 
one option. What are the benefits over using and NAS running NFS (which are 
usually cheaper)?

Also, it seems I am reading that you can enable live migration on an XCP pool 
without an external storage device at all, using local storage in each host. Is 
that right?


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