I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots
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@dave247 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
Just a SAN that's virtualized. VMware's vSAN wasn't even the first. Starwind's vSAN is older, for example. And lots of us were building vSANs back around 2005 or earlier. It was common to do it back then, especially in labs.
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@dave247 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
ok so lets say I didn't have a SAN and I didn't want to use vSAN or whatever. Is there another good method, such as maybe having two physical Windows servers basically serving up mirrored storage via iSCSI or FCoE?
So now that we know you meant VMware's vSAN product...
The big alternative (and assumed starting point for most of the SMB) is Starwind vSAN. It's available for free and in paid versions with support.
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@scottalanmiller said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
@dave247 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
ok so lets say I didn't have a SAN and I didn't want to use vSAN or whatever. Is there another good method, such as maybe having two physical Windows servers basically serving up mirrored storage via iSCSI or FCoE?
So now that we know you meant VMware's vSAN product...
The big alternative (and assumed starting point for most of the SMB) is Starwind vSAN. It's available for free and in paid versions with support.
Well it's not even that I "meant VMware's vSAN product". I just assumed that's what we were talking about when "VSAN was mentioned", which clearly it is not.
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@scottalanmiller said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
@dave247 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
ok so lets say I didn't have a SAN and I didn't want to use vSAN or whatever.
There are basically four possible choices. This isn't about what is good or bad, just what is theoretically possible....
- Local storage (storage that connects without going over the network.)
- SAN (storage that connects over the network).
Then of each of those, they can be replicated or not replicated.
So you end up with...
- Plain SAN
- Replicated SAN
- Plain Local Storage
- Replicated Local Storage
ok thanks for clearing that up.
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@dave247 if you want to play at home, you can do Starwind vSAN, Gluster, and DRBD all pretty easily for free just to see how they physically work. Can be a fun experiment.
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@scottalanmiller said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
@dave247 if you want to play at home, you can do Starwind vSAN, Gluster, and DRBD all pretty easily for free just to see how they physically work. Can be a fun experiment.
How/where?
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@dave247 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
@scottalanmiller said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
@dave247 if you want to play at home, you can do Starwind vSAN, Gluster, and DRBD all pretty easily for free just to see how they physically work. Can be a fun experiment.
How/where?
Setup your hypervisor of choice and use StarWinds vSAN solution. They have deployment guides right on their website.
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@dave247 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
@scottalanmiller said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
@dave247 if you want to play at home, you can do Starwind vSAN, Gluster, and DRBD all pretty easily for free just to see how they physically work. Can be a fun experiment.
How/where?
Well let's use Gluster as an example. Gluster runs on Linux (and maybe a few other things, never looked beyond Linux for it.) So that means you can use it with KVM, LXC, Xen, or VirtualBox for example.
Gluster wants three nodes or more. So pick your Linux... CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. And do three VMs and build a Gluster Cluster (and see it out loud for extra fun.) Then find other fun things to say to people at work like "I'm off to muster a Gluster Cluster."
Gluster will work just fine (if a tad slow) with just a small slice of storage, three VMs, and all built on the same underlying disk(s). You can do it on a laptop. Obviously, just for learning.
No need for "real" storage beneath it. It will work exactly the same in a lab scenario.
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So Gluster seems like a solid solution in a lot of cases, but for performance workloads that can scale up, you'd likely want to use the Distributed Striped Glusterfs Volume, but this doesn't provide any redundancy, just a performance boost.
And would require* a backup solution of some sort.
AKA an agent on your VM to take backups at the file level so anything could be restored.
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@DustinB3403 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
So Gluster seems like a solid solution in a lot of cases,
It's a pretty stock "go to" for this stuff. Very broadly used. RHEV uses it by default. Which means oVirt does, too.
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@scottalanmiller said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
@DustinB3403 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
So Gluster seems like a solid solution in a lot of cases,
It's a pretty stock "go to" for this stuff. Very broadly used. RHEV uses it by default. Which means oVirt does, too.
One of the easier open source ones to configure imo. Nothing beats StarWind for easy of configuration that I've used.
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@travisdh1 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:
Nothing beats StarWind for easy of configuration that I've used.
And performance.
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@scottalanmiller StarWind performance is really great! It's able to give 2 times better performance on read operations on HA device! Link to the Benchmark Best Practices document: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/best-practices/starwind-virtual-san-starwind-benchmarking-best-practices/
