We are looking to move our infrastructure from our office to a COLO.
Currently we run a rack-mount white-box server using commodity hardware, and ESXi 4 as the hypervisor to power 9 VM's for internal development/DC/Exchange etc.
We are looking to use a SAN for storage, and have come up with a network diagram which allows us to use the spare ethernet port on the physical server to attach to another server – which is proposed to be used by the SAN.
The question is, is an ethernet port sufficient for this application? It is a gigabit ethernet port. I have used fibre in the past for this, but not ethernet.
These guys (http://www.datacore.com/) have a method of providing SAN over ethernet.
The proposed physical architecture is as follows:
With the virtual machines looking a bit like this (onbviously the connection between pfSense and eth1 would be removed if the top server was a SAN ):
Best Answer
I've had good luck with iSCSI and moderate workloads, but of course whether or not the single gigabit connection will be able to keep up with your environment is not something we'll be able to help you determine.
The one glaring omission I noticed immediately with your plan is that, by only using a single port for your storage, you have no option for failover or load balancing. Of course, if you only have a single-head SAN (which seems to be the case), you have a single point of failure there as well.