On Jun 30, 2009, at 10:51 AM, Atom Powers wrote:
> What kind of storage do you use for your VMs?

We've had a lot of success with the Storage Appliances by LeftHand  
(now acquired by HP's StorageWorks division). They are iSCSI  
appliances that cluster together, share a virtual-IP amongst  
themselves, keep replicas of your data on more than one appliance for  
redundancy, etc., etc.

So basically you create an iSCSI LUN, and every block of data on that  
LUN appears on (2) different appliances, with the Virtual-IP serving  
you up data from one or the other as it sees fit. If the appliance  
that has the VIP on it goes down, one of the other appliances takes  
over seamlessly.

The LeftHand software makes things REALLY easy to do. For instance, we  
had installed (3) SATA-based storage-modules. After a while, we  
decided we wanted better performance of SAS-based modules. With other  
vendors' solutions, it would have required creating new LUNs,  
migrating data from one LUN to another, mounting the new LUNs, etc.,  
etc.  With LeftHand, we simply told the cluster "remove these SATA  
units but at the same time add these SAS units" and it seamlessly  
restriped our data across all the new modules, SERVING THE DATA THE  
WHOLE TIME. We migrated from one set of storage modules to another  
with NO production impact. :-)

So, yeah... LeftHand FTW. :-)

Cheers,
D


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