This post is more than 5 years old
13 Posts
0
939
June 15th, 2015 19:00
How to use VMware deployment on a standalone host for eval.
Hi,
We are wanting to eval ScaleIO on our system as a standalone host with no failure servers.
We currently don't have any pass through devices that we can enable on our farm as currently our storage is provided by FC SANs.
What I want is for the ScaleIO VMware deployment to spit out an installation that will allow me to add virtual disks to the single appliance after install (so I can re-present say a single 200GB vmdk as a virtual disk 1 to the appliance (this is just for eval).
When I go through the vsphere install there seem to be a couple of quirks that prevent this.
I have selected a "single mode deployment under advanced options" and I have deselected the "MDM cluster mode" option (step 5).
I then get stuck at step 10; "Add SDSs" - even though I've already specified the host I'm going to dpeloy on I can only get to step 11 by selected the host + an additional 2 hosts.
This shouldn't be enforced on a single node deployment surely?
On step 11 because I don't currently have any devices that can be used (as they are the FC LUNS already representing the datastores on our farm), I can't proceed to step 12.
So what I'm looking for is an option to allow a single host to be specified for the SDS and for the "Add devices to SDS" option to be deferred until after the setup is deployed (to give me chance to add a virtual disk of 3 after the appliance has been deployed).
How do I achieve this through the vsphere deployment GUI?
alexkh
60 Posts
0
June 18th, 2015 22:00
Hi Ashley,
ScaleIO is an enterprise level storage, which means redundancy, thus single component failure should not affect the clients.
ScaleIO was designed to run on physical hosts, therefore, using option 2 or 3 will work, however you won't get the desired performance.
alexkh
60 Posts
0
June 16th, 2015 05:00
ScaleIO needs minimum of 3 nodes for installation.
The single mode option might be misleading, but it refers to MDM cluster, and not the number of SDS nodes.
ashleywatson
13 Posts
0
June 18th, 2015 21:00
thanks Alex, So if we have a standalone whitebox that we want to use as an iscsi backup target,are our options;
1: We continue to use a ZFS based box running somehthing like OmniOS with disks passed through as RDM or using PCI controller pass through like we do at the moment?
2. We create 3 VMs and then present the storage back to the host
3. We run nested vsphere instances - which isn't viable due to the nesting overhead and also VMware licensing.
If we went for option 2 - would that provide better performance than 1.
So for our Tier2 backup storage it looks like we are going to get much better bang for the buck by keeping using our ZFS based vSANs?
Its a shame the ScaleIO product can't be deployed onto a single host and single OS instance - it would open up the market for the product.
cheers
Ashley