Storage

After a long an arduous certification and regression testing process following many problems with LSI 3108 based controllers that I have been using for VSAN they are finally VSAN 6.2 certified. Having seen and opened multiple tickets about strange controller behaviors (hot add controller do VMware have released a FW/HW and Software combo that, according to a highly regarded VMware internal storage resource: Its certainly the most tested combination of a firmware/driver/controller ever at this point […] My understanding is the reason this took so long is they didn’t just fix the big issue, but also minor ones too, and any minor regressions ...

Introduction Centrally managing your storage is nice - especially when you’ve just built your own SANs (or such). I created a synchronous replicating SAN cluster using LSI MegaRAID 9270-8i cards in 2x Dell R720XD chassis built on openSUSE 12.3 (more on that in another article soon). We are migrating from 2x Dell MD3000i to these beasts built on a pure-cli OS. Some people like GUIs and that’s okay - so for day-to-day admin, email reporting on problems and basic configuration and tasks LSI offer (free) MegaRAID Storage Manager ↗. It works much in the same way as Dell’s MD Storage Manager ↗ that we currently use for the MD3000i but (obviously) without the ability to create iSCSI LUNs etc as they are managed by the OS, not the RAID card. ...