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A “Poor man’s SAN” for ESX vSphere with VSA
Posted on May 1st, 2011 by Bert Zefat
Just thinking on how to make a “Poor man’s SAN” I came across this this idear:
Take 2 servers with enough disk space available and the ability to expand when needed. Install on both systems ESXi vSphere. With this installed, create on your ESX hosts VM’s with the VSA you can buy from HP.
The VSA is the same software that is running on the P4000 from HP, but now running inside your vSphere environment. The licenses go up to 10TB.
Doing so on both ESX hosts you can setup you SAN/iQ management environment and also your (first) cluster.
Now you have created your own iSCSI “P4000” like SAN. You can now connect to it from your production ESX vSphere environment.
One thing. Support from HP is NOT included.
(drawing will follow)