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Celerra redundancy
Hi,
we currently have a Celerra NS500 gateway in front of a Clariion CX700 array and we are evaluating a Celerra NS-480 as next unified storage but we have some perplexities.
From actual experience, the most critical point in Celerra architecture is the active/standby nature of datamovers and the small number of Ethernet ports, that don't allow a real high-availability.
In fact, using two ports (in fail-safe) for CIFS and remaining two ports for iSCSI, with links to two differente switches, we experienced problems even during datamover failover (during FLARE upgrades, for instance). Especially with iSCSI and VMware, usually, all VMs die during failover and this is not good.
In my opinion, active-standby datamovers and active-standby (failsafe) interfaces don't protect in effective way in all cases. Peraphs, do we need to use Power Path even with VMware ESX?
Other considerations?
Thank you, even if most considerations are valid for vSphere and we still have 3.5.x.
I know that NFS is more flexible than iSCSI but I'm still persuaded that a block filesystem formatted with VMware's own filesystem VMFS is always better, when possible.
Rainer_EMC
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Posted April 6th, 2010 08:00
sure
for surviving a data mover failover the timeout options are most important - they havent changed between 3.5 and 4.0
Rainer
Rainer_EMC
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Posted April 6th, 2010 04:00
Hi,
no you dont need PowerPath for that - you just need to configure multipathing and the timeouts correctly
see here TechBook: Using EMC Celerra Storage with VMware vSphere and VMware Infrastructure
Once you've done ESX will cope with a data mover failover just fine.
We are also working on shortening the data mover reboot time - there are already improvements in the latest DART codes and there is going to be more in the future.
You also might want to look at using NFS instead of ISCSI - it has some advantages now in terms of provisioning, cloning and compression.
see the latest post from jgrinwis here on the forum
Rainer