LINBIT VSAN: SDS For VMware
Tech Preview - free of charge for the first year
We want to highlight that LINBIT® VSAN should only be used for testing. It is free of charge for the first year while we work on polishing it. Bug reports are appreciated. For a complete production-ready solution, please refer to LINBIT SDS.
SDS for VMware Deployments
LINBIT® VSAN SDS for VMware is a software defined storage solution for small and medium-sized VMware® deployments. We build it with VMware ESXi as a target platform in mind, but it is independent of the hypervisor software itself. It is also usable on an Oracle VM Server for x86 installation or any other Hypervisor software.
It consumes storage resources (HDDs, SSDs, NVMEs, PMEMs) passed into the virtual appliances. It provides a highly available iSCSI target for the virtualization cluster. That iSCSI target is then consumed from the virtualization software to place a datastore on. All the workload’s virtual disks are placed on that datastore.
EASY TO INSTALL, EASY TO USE
LINBIT VSAN SDS for VMware is a virtual appliance is delivered as an OVA file. Alternatively, it is also available as an ISO file, from that file the same virtual appliance can be installed. For the configuration of the highly available storage cluster a polished HTML5 (material design) graphical user interface is provided. This can be used by everyone who can take care of the hypervisor installation. No LINUX skills required!
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FEATURES
2-Way Replicated Volumes
3-Way Replicated Volumes
High Availability Cluster With A Quorum To Prevent Split-Brain
Highly Available
iSCSI Targets
Thin Provisioning
Web Dashboard
High Performance
IOPS And Throughput
Open Source
CentOS8 based
EXAMPLE CONFIGURATIONS
Small Configuration
The solution needs three servers at least, but not all of them need to be full-blown virtualization servers. It is sufficient if two of them come with storage devices for the datastore. All writes to the iSCSI target are mirrored to the first two servers. The third is needed to provide quorum in the system during the failure of one machine.
Also regarding the necessary CPU and memory, you have the option to equip either two or all three servers with CPU and memory that is suitable to run guest VMs.
3-Way Redundant Configuration
For very valuable data a 3-way redundancy configuration. Please note that such a three-way configuration can be combined with the model shown above. For example, you could equip server 1 with 2 NVMe drives, server 2 with 2 drives and server 3 with just one drive.
One of each server is designated for the 3-way redundant datastore, the two remaining for a 2-way redundant data store. Actually, the software does not stop a 3-way redundancy it can also do 4 and more.
4 Node Configuration
Here is a configuration with 4 nodes, that exposes two two-way-redundant datastores to the hypervisor software. All 4 nodes are used to execute VMs of the workload. The LINBIT VSAN appliance scales to 16 nodes in a single cluster.
NOTE: There are many more configurations possible, get in touch with us to discuss the possibilities in the context of your requirements.
Open Appliance With Full Linux Flexibility
This LINBIT VSAN SDS for VMware solution contains a broad range of open source technologies: CentOS8, DRBD®, LINSTOR®, Pacemaker, linstor-iscsi. Its focus is to make these complex technologies available to a non Linux affine audience. At the same time, we keep the openness of the open-source ecosystem.
All of LINBIT’s components are packaged as RPM packages and integrated on top of CentOS8 as it is best practise in the industry. The root account is available to the user. If an additional monitoring system should be installed, no problem. Open to any customization we at LINBIT did not envision beforehand. For a more technical overview of LINSTOR please check our user guide here.
