A virtual SAN appliance is designed to run alongside virtual server applications without requiring dedicated SAN hardware. The VSA clusters the internal storage in multiple x86 servers running ESX servers to create an otherwise full-featured SAN that can be used by both virtual and non-virtual applications. This gives users the high-availability benefits of VMware Infrastructure 3 (such as thin provisioning, snapshots and remote copy) that are unavailable to local storage, but without the cost of physical shared storage.
In other words . . . Set up a Linux VM on each of your ESX3 servers, and allocate all the unused disk to that VM. Use drb/netblock or something else to mirror or raid all that disk between several servers. Serve it out via iSCSI and let the regular server VM’s point at that now replicated disk; start using the extra features of VMWare ESX3 without needing dedicated SAN storage.
Performance would be shitty but it is an interesting idea. Something somebody could no doubt throw together and offer on sourceforge with little effort. Maybe start with FreeNAS or something like that. Perhaps ZFS on Solaris X86 instead…
Leave a Reply