Comments on: A storage cluster is born

By: mike

mike — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:36:52 +0000

I have posted my new blog post about Nexenta and my issues over the last 17 months (I did not document them all).

By: stevebaynet

stevebaynet — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:13:23 +0000

Excellent, looking forward to hearing about your trials and tribulations. Planning to start my own in the next few weeks. Thanks!

By: Jamie

Jamie — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:11:19 +0000

Please do! We built basically the same setup as you. I just came across your post tonight. Anyways we’ve had great luck with our set up.
I’m really interested in hearing what’s going on.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:29:51 +0000

Well, truth be told…I am not the most happy of people.

I was just told I should make a followup post, so I better get going on that. I’ll put in details.

I’ll get’er done soon.

By: stevebaynet

stevebaynet — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:03:22 +0000

late to the party but…

how is this build working out for you a year later-ish? (im considering something very similar) Reliability? etc

also, how did the install/setup of the HA plugin go? was it relatively straight forward?

By: Virtual Solutions to Physical Limitations | ipHouse Blog

Virtual Solutions to Physical Limitations | ipHouse Blog — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:05:14 +0000

[...] Redundant: The ipHouse VMware cluster is comprised of three Dell R905’s as the physical hosts and uses a NAS storage cluster on the backend for storage of the VMware disk images. Having three Dell R905’s gives the cluster redundancy especially when using VMware HA/DRS (more to come on that below). More information on the NAS can be found here. [...]

By: mcubed4130

mcubed4130 — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:21:44 +0000

Thanks for the clarification… this is one of those the picture would have said the thousand words thing. :-)

Any chance you can post a picture of the back of the head units?

And/or is perhaps your part list above on each of the head units supposed to say “( 2 ) CABL-0167L Backplane Cable ” ?

This SAS stuff is new to me… but I am looking for something to do with my SC846 cases I have laying around. :-)

By: mike

mike — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:37:48 +0000

Uhm, no.

Each head connects to JBOD1 and JBOD2, active clustering via RSF-1 is running and working.

The heads themselves are not cross connected.

By: mcubed4130

mcubed4130 — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:04:48 +0000

So after all that work… getting interposers for the sata ssds, and such – you didn’t actually cross connect the head units?

So in effect you have Head unit#1 connected to JBOD#1 – and Head unit#2 connected to JBOD#2 only?

And then you just ran software sync and active-passive fail-over between the 2 head units? ( i.e. I think you did what TonyB called – “AutoCDP + simple failover” ? )

-Michael

By: mike

mike — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 16:30:10 +0000

Icy Dock.

hacksaw

Hot glue

I HATE HACKERY

But there wasn’t another way to do this :(

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:13:52 +0000

Too bad. I’m having a heck of a time figuring out how everything fits with the interposer. We got the MCP-220-00043-0N 3.5″-2.5″ adapter, but with the interposer attached to the drive, it sticks out of the drive bay too far. We also tried the drive in an ICYDock adapter and had the same result.

I didn’t see it mentioned – what adapter did you use?

By: mike

mike — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 21:08:02 +0000

Sorry, no, didn’t take pictures before it was all put together.

I am working on building another for a customer and will put up pictures of everything this time around.

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:00:15 +0000

I figure I’m a bit late to the commenting game, but do you have a picture of the interposer/SSD/adapter all put together? I’ve found very little information on these interposers, and from what I can find, they don’t *quite* fit in the supermicro 2.5″ to 3.5″ “adapter”.

By: mike

mike — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 23:37:06 +0000

Hiya, for this installation, no multipath was done on the SCSI layer.

The head units are 1U tall, there isn’t enough room for 2 cables coming out to the units in a clean, non-hackery way.

By: tonyb

tonyb — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 21:59:24 +0000

Thanks for the great article! Very informative.

Do you do any Multipath-ing to the JBOD units?

What about redundancy between the two JBOD boxes? if the JBOD enclosure fails are you protected?

I’m trying to weight my options between two separate nodes with AutoCDP + simple failover vs Shared Storage + HA.