Homemade san suggestions

[[Darkend]Viper]

Hi all,

Right i've got 2 esxi 5 servers, and would like to have shared storage accessible to them and the rest of the network. The esxi I would like to connect via iscsi or nfs. The rest I would like to map a drive to via smb, and also if possible stream movies to the ps3, xbmc and tv. If I can't stream i'll use ps3 media server for it.

Hardware i've got available is a core2duo machine, 2 lsi megaraid 8308elp cards , which have 8 ports each, which support sas and sata. I've got 5x 2tb, 2x 1tb and various other smaller drives. I have a 24 port gig managed switch and a 48 port 100mb managed switch with 2x gig ports.

I know if I mix a smaller drive i'll end up having a smaller array so know i've either got to do raid via software, or just have 4 or 5 different arrays.

Can someone suggest some good ways of connecting everything together, and what software to use, i've been looking at openfiler and freenas. I've racked my brains and am starting to struggle with how to get it all to work together. This is a test environment for testing out and playing with esxi, but I also want to centralise my storage, so everything is there, in one place, which can be accessed from any machine on the network. Might look at sorting access out from the internet at some point in the future.

Ste

 

[[Darkend]Viper]

Thanks for the input, now it looks like I just need to sort out someway of connecting all the drives together, as the sas card has a breakout cable to individual sata plugs, which won't connect onto the sas drives but will the sata ones.

Anyone know of a way of making a storage enclosure that will house 8 or 16 disks, got 2 controllers and thought that it would be a nice idea to have them all in an external box, so they're completely seperate.

 

[[Darkend]Viper]

Well i've got the hardware already, so am just reusing that. I've found the cable that I need for connecting the lsi megaraid to sas drives directly without a backplane, it's a SFF8087 to 4x SFF8482. Works out cheaper than buying sas to sata apaptors.

I've also found out the controller will support 8x direct connected drives or 16x drives using an expander or two. Does anyone know whether it would be better performance running 2x controllers and 8 drives on each or one controller with 16x drives?

I've also found an old full tower atx case with a load of hard disk bays, so am going to look at filling that with hdd's and seeing how many I can get in.