Installing: Xtravirt Virtual SAN

Today we're looking at the Xtravirt Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) solution for use with VMware ESX Server 3. It is designed to be a simple to deploy, redundant (DRBD synchronization), high-availability iSCSI SAN between two ESX servers. We are installing it on two ESXi servers, each with local storage, running the latest patch update (3.5.0 build 143129).

Initial Installation

XVS requires a virtual machine import: either using Converter or manual process. We follow the manual process. We used the command line to convert the imported disk into a ESXi-compliant format:

vmkfstools -i XVS.vmdk -d thin XVSnew.vmdk
rm -f XVS.vmdk XVS-*

After conversion, you have a 2GB virtual machine (times two) ready for configuration. We removed the legacy ethernet and hard disk that came with the inventory import. Then add the "existing" disk and new Ethernet (flex) controller.

We then added a 120GB virtual disk to each node using the local storage controllers: LSI 1068SAS (RAID1) for node 1 and NVidia MCP55Pro (RAID1) for node 2. Node 1 and 2 are using the same 250GB Seagate ES.2 (RAID edition) drives.

Xtravirt Virtual SAN Appliance

The gurus at Xtravirt have cooked-up a virtual SAN appliance (VSA) to be run directly on ESX using local VMFS storage as the SAN backing. While this approach may imply some performance hits, the price is worth a look: free.

The appliance is designed to be deployed on two ESX hosts and replicates synchronously between them for fail-over capability. We'll throw their VSA onto our lab machines and see what the fuss is about.