Best strategy For Datastores

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Hi All,

I work for a large tech company and I’m repurposing some old hardware for a self-service cloud. I’m hardware rich, but software poor. I have 8 largish compute nodes (2TB RAM 100+ cores each) and a 400TB 3Par array. I’m trying to figure the best way to use this 3Par. I must have VM snapshots, thin provisioning, and live migration. The largest lun that I can present is 64TB, so I will be breaking it up into 6 or 7 luns most likely.

I see that a 3Par driver has been written, but I think I would prefer to stick with a more tried and true method. It seems like NFS is the only technology that meets my requirements, I was surprised that I couldn’t directly mount the lun via Fibre Channel as shared storage (like in Vmware with vmfs). My frame of reference is VMware, luns, san, etc. I see that Opennebula treats storage much differently.

I have the ability to server NFS directly from the 3Par, so I’m thinking this might be my best bet. But would like to hear if there are better methods, especially if they are native FC. I also wouldn’t be opposed to frontending my 3Par with a server (treating the 3Par as DAS) to serve NFS or someother protocol that would be better. Thanks!

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Hello, I am the author of 3par driver. We use it in production for 4years, it is stable and proven to work. There is also remote copy and peer persistence support.

VM snapshots are supported and offloaded to 3par
Live migration is supported.
Thin provisioning is supported by 3par along with deduplication and compression. Configurable on datastore level.
Each VM disk is separate VV on 3par and on hypersvisor as lun.

So this driver basically supports all your requirements

2 Likes
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Hi all, To use VVOLs with 3PAR, you need the HP 3PAR Virtual Copy license and the vSphere Standard license.
For NFS you will need File Persona and Network cards,
If it is not the case, you need to use an Clustered FileSystem like OCFS2, GFS and others.
Acquiring licenses for 3PAR is hard now days, but i recommend the 3PAR driver developed by @feldsam .

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Hi @Nacho, yes, it is not possible to buy anymore anyting from 3PAR 8000 series from HPE, but we stock used/refurb systems with All Inclusive Single or Multi system licenses. Check our eBay store here 3par | eBay

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Unfortunately my system is an 7440c and does not got this All inclusive licensing.
BTW, did you plan to build the Primera driver?

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@cad_xlr
There is also an iSCSI storage page for Opennebula.

That would waste the FC bandwidth, but would save an intermediate NFS server.

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This iSCSI vs NFS benchmark claims 10 to 300% more throughput from iSCSI over NFS, especially for database workload (OLTP). Not the same virtual stack, but it gives an idea…