G'day.
I was wondering what sort of experiences y'all had with ATA over Ethernet in a
primarily Linux environment. This would be operated as backing storage for
KVM based virtual machines, Linux host and guest.
We would be looking, at this stage, to attach the AOE devices to the host,
then use an LVM layer atop that, then the KVM guest devices stored as raw LVM
logical volumes.[1]
The deployment would be Gigabit Ethernet, typically using a dedicated SAN NIC
in each host — but we have a bunch of single NIC legacy hardware that I would
be loath to throw out just for this, so comments on the cost of sharing that
port with regular TCP would be interesting.
Anyway, I am interested in feedback in terms of:
Performance of the Linux ATAoE client for "extra" disk storage, rather than
storage needed to actually boot the system. I am happy with a couple of local
disks for storing the OS.
Performance of the vblade and ggaoed software ATAoE target implementations,
hosted on Linux. Backing would be solid local storage on LSI hardware RAID,
and currently these give great performance, so I am happy we have plenty of
IOPS and disk bandwidth to play with there.
Performance and manageability of the Coraid hardware — and, ideally, how well
it plays in a mixed software and dedicated environment with the software
targets.
Comments are much appreciated.
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] This isn't set in stone, but is the model most easily integrated with
both our current practice, and with our virtualization toolchain, plus it
offers some advantages like live data migration with pvmove and friends,
or encryption by layering dmcrypt over the LV.
--
✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ [email protected] ☎ +61 401 155 707
♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons
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