I am trying to come up with the best way to create a small ZFS backed redundant SAN for a testing environment running a couple dozen small Xen instances. I would like to do this with OpenSolaris since it allows me the option of using commodity hardware initially and scaling up to 'something better' later as required. As usual, we're trying to achieve the impossible with no money! :-)
I am looking for a little guidance on the best way to skin this. I've seen solutions like NexentaStor, but budget won't stretch to that or anything similar. The requirements are: - 1.5TB+ capacity (no problem with lots of small, cheap disks) - redundancy (at least two nodes, maybe three) - optionally, provide iSCSI boot for the Xen dom0s My thoughts so far have been around using two servers each with 3 x gbE NICs into a couple of gigabit switches and run openha cluster on them (with a simple crossover cable between them for the heartbeat). The storage would be simple, directly connected SATA disks in each server (unless using external eSATA enclosures connected to all nodes is better?). My understanding of the above is that openha takes care of duplicating the data across both servers and provides the redundancy? Is this reasonable? Many thanks in advance, Matt. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
