Nas Vmware Appliance
Image: iStock/BrianAJacksonIt's not uncommon for networking professionals to put together a home lab to test concepts and prepare for certifications. The VMware ESXi platform is a commonly used virtualization platform that one may come across in these home labs. In this article we will examine how to integrate a Synology NAS with an ESXi server as a home lab platform. Essentially the Synology NAS will be an iSCSI target so that you can take advantage of the disk space available on the Synology NAS to house the VM's you deploy on the VMware ESXi server.Before getting started let's define some of the terminology we'll be using for this solution. iSCSI Target: This is a storage resource that located on a server. ISCSI is a protocol that's used to link data storage devices on that server over an IP network infrastructure.
LUN: Logical unit number, used to identify a logical unit, which is a device addressed by the SCSI protocol. NAS: Network attached storage, a network-accessible platform that gives access to storage space. In the case of this article, the Synology NAS will provide an iSCSI target so our ESXi server can use it for storage.The following steps must be followed to configure the Synology NAS as an iSCSI target.1. Log into DSM as admin.2. Go to Storage Manager iSCSI LUN, and click Create. File-Level iSCSI allows you to create targets on existing storage volumes, so that storage may be shared between the two storage systems. In this case we only have this option because the NAS is used for other things such as web hosting, email services and so on.Choosing Block-Level iSCSI does offer faster performance, but requires the usage of an entire storage volume which isn't possible in this case.4.
Specify the LUN information:Enter a name for the iSCSI LUN. In this case ours follows the recommended format of iqn.yyyy-mm.domain:device.IDAlso, if you've provisioned VMs in the past you probably already know what thin provisioning is all about. This option will allow the storage capacity of the iSCSI Target to be dynamic and allocated on-demand so you don't carve out x amount of storage right up front.Next, our capacity will be set to 1 GB for this example and the iSCSI Target mapping and we have selected the Create a new iSCSI Target option.5.
Click Next to continue.6. Define the iSCSI target information.This includes a name, iqn, and possible CHAP authentication information.Again our name follows the recommended format of iqn.yyyy-mm.domain:device.ID and the iqn is populated already. If we enable CHAP it will require iSCSI Initiators to be authenticated before using the iSCSI Target.
We don't have a need for this at the moment so we will leave that blank.8. Click Next to continue.9. Now we confirm and click Apply to save our settings.Our new LUN now appears.And we can check our iSCSI target as well:The next step in the process is the add the iSCSI target to our ESXi server. For this we need to jump over into our VMware vSphere client.1. First, browse to the host in the vSphere Web Client navigator and make sure the Manage tab is selected.2. To add a storage adapter follow these steps:a.
Click StorageStorage adapters.3. Add a software iSCSI adapter.4. Select Network Port Binding and bind to the NIC for network access.5. Add the target.To do this, select the Targets tab and click add under Dynamic Discovery.6. Enter the IP address of the NAS and click OK.Once you do this you'll want to rescan your storage adapters, pictured below. Once you've done so your new adapter should show up and you can use it for deploying VMs.While this is not a practical application in an enterprise network, it makes sense to do things like this in a lab environment.
It helps you squeeze more storage to test VMs and it's a low cost way of doing so. At the same time the Synology can be used for other services since it has a pretty rich package repository.
Let's start with a brief introduction. In vSphere 5.0, VMware releases a new storage appliance called the VSA. VSA is an acronym for “vSphere Storage Appliance”. This appliance is aimed at our SMB (Small and Mid-size Business) customers who may not be in a position to purchase a physical SAN or NAS array for their virtual infrastructure, and as a result, these customers do not have shared storage.Without access to shared storage, SMB customers are unable to implement many of vSphere’s core technologies, such as vSphere HA & vMotion.
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Customers who decide to deploy a VSA can now benefit from many additional vSphere features without having to purchase a SAN or NAS device to provide them with shared storage.Customers require two or three newly installed (green-field) ESXi 5.0 hosts to create a VSA cluster. The ESXi hosts must not have any virtual machines deployed & have the default logical network configuration (Management portgroup & VM portgroup). The local storage on the ESXi host should be configured into a RAID10 setup for optimal resilience. Should the server lose a disk spindle, it will not impact the VSA cluster storage. The recommendation is to use 8 local disks per ESXi; this will give optimal performance.During the ESXi 5.0 deployment, a VMFS-5 is created on all the remaining available disk space on the ESXi servers.Each ESXi 5.0 host will have an appliance/Virtual Machine deployed to it by the VSA cluster installer.
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The appliances are deployed with multiple disks (VMDKs) which allows them to use (almost) all of the VMFS-5. The appliances then present one replicated volume via NFS to each of the ESXi 5.0 hosts in the cluster.
This replication of storage volumes makes the VSA very resilient to failures. All ESXi 5.0 hosts now have shared storage.VSA Manager is the component used to manage the VSA cluster. VSA Manager is a vCenter Server 5.0 extension that you install on a vCenter Server machine.
After you install it & the VSA Manager plugin is enabled, you can see the VSA Manager tab in the vSphere Client. VSA Manager will deploy & afterwards monitor the VSA cluster. Here is a screen-shot of the VSA Manager from a 3 node configuration:The VSA manages the data replication/redundancy by dividing the local storage on the appliance into two distinct volumes, one volume becomes the replica/mirror source and the other becomes a replica/mirror destination (for a source replica on a different appliance). It then exposes the mirrored volume as an NFS volume over the network, which allows it to be mounted by all the ESXi hosts in the VSA cluster. VSphere HA & a vMotion network are also configured for all ESXi hosts in the cluster.This is all done automatically by the installer. August 2nd, 2011Hi Steven, this is VSA 1.0 – give us a chance 🙂 Seriously though, our primary concern is making sure everyone has a good experience with the product so we are including some tight guidelines in this release (as you’ve alluded to in the post).
And yes, we are looking at lifting some of these as we go forward but no guarantees at this time. Hopefully there are still enough cool features in the VSA which will make it attractive enough for our SMB customers to at least evaluate it. Bryan August 10th, 2011Based on the comment by Chogan; There’s no scalability in VSA 1.0?The concept overall is great for SMB but the lack of being able to expand sounds like we’re forcing SMB customers to guess at what they will need and then pay-ahead for that guess. After a few years, once they actually end up growing beyond the guess they’ve made, they will most likely be at a financial point where the negative customer experience and their added choice flexibility would drive them away from both VSA and whoever sold them the solution. Are there plans to allow for scalability in the next release? Also, will the customers of 1.0 be capable of upgrading to a release that has these added features without having to go back to bare metal?.
September 1st, 2011I have an existing vSphere Essentials+ deployment with three active servers and a dozen plus VMs. I would very much like to upgrade my ESXi hosts and transition our VMs off our low end SATA based NAS/SAN device onto high performance enterprise grade internal SAS storage / servers.
Given that my Foundation Class vCenter license only allows me to manage three ESXi hosts, it seem to me that I’m going to have to take down my entire existing cluster, disconnect my existing ESXi hosts from vCenter, set up the VSA, etc. On the new servers, and then manually migrate my VM images off the old storage onto the VSA, and bring them up there.
There’s no real way around this, right? I can’t leave one of the old hosts connected, and set up just two of the new ones, and then add the third new ESXi/VSA host later, right?. January 18th, 2012Hi KZ,First thing to clarify is that a vCenter server outage will not affect the VSA. We only use the vCenter for management in a 3 node cluster, and for management and tie-breaker code in a 2 node cluster.What I mean about a complete cluster outage is that when all nodes in a cluster are brought down – complete power outage at site would be an example.And yes indeed, when the cluster comes back up, it will synchronize all of its mirrors automatically, and once sync’ed will present back the NFS datastores to the ESXi hosts. February 23rd, 2012Hi Charlie,There is no hard and fast limit to how many VMs can run on the VSA per se, but there are two consideration in particular to keep in mind.The first is to measure the combined I/O throughput and latency expectations of the 75 VMs, and verifying that the VSA can cope. There is a WP which discusses the performance one can expect from the VSA; it should help with this:The second is to ensure that you do not over commit memory on any of the ESX hosts. Since VSA participates in a vSphere HA cluster, you must also ensure that there is no memory overcomit when an ESXi host fails, and in a 3 node cluster where all the VMs move over to the remaining 2 nodes, you’ll have to ensure that all 75 VMs can power up on the remaining 2 nodes without overcommitting memory.Hopefully this will help in your decision making process.Cormac.
April 21st, 2013VSA is great. 12x1TB boils down to 1.7TB of usable storage but it’s worth it. It’s a resilient platform. I lost my vCenter Server with the VSA manager after a disastrous SQL update. The individual ESXi hosts in the VSA cluster and their VMs continued to function. It took a couple of minutes to fire up a new vCenter Server from a pre-prepared template and then using the inbuilt VSA Recovery to the new vCenter Server worked like a charm. I think Cormac covers VSA Recovery in another blog post.Comments are closed.
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