iSCSI HA - Failover fetures

[Clouseau]

I'm running VMware a lot and using FreeNAS as iSCSI storage. Now I would like to build up HA/FAILOVER iSCSCI and that's not possile with FreeNAS.

Or is it?

Mainly problem is SQL servers where you have open active database files...

 

[zambanini]

seamless failover is not possible.

but you can talk to ixsystem about trueNAS.

 

[_Adrian_]

I think it would be a good feature as well as load balancing across FC Links as HBA cards are getting pretty cheap nowadays.
In some cases the price of a gigabit card is about the same as a multi port HBA ( 4x 4GB )... being able to aggregate this amount of bandwidth would offer a reliable way of transporting large amounts of data at extremely low latencies !!
having 2 of these cards side by side would not only offer good insurance, but also would always have an active host in case of hardware failure.

 

[mav@]

_Adrian_, nothing prevents you from installing several FC cards, same as establishing several iSCSI sessions to do MPIO for reliability purposes. Though that is not what usually called HA.
Clouseau, TrueNAS from iXsytems provides HA with full head redundancy for iSCSI and other protocols, though not for FC yet.

 

[_Adrian_]

mav@, i understand what HA ( High Availability) or Multi Pathing is...
What I was referring to was the need for load balancing on iSCSI connections to allow "LACP" or connection teaming to achieve a overall higher throughput to a single target

 

[ser_rhaegar]

mav@, i understand what HA ( High Availability) or Multi Pathing is...
What I was referring to was the need for load balancing on iSCSI connections to allow "LACP" or connection teaming to achieve a overall higher throughput to a single target

You're asking for MPIO then. LACP/teaming is not what you're looking for. The only place where LACP and iSCSI are discussed together is Hyper-V with Microsoft's teaming driver and even then it isn't recommended but it is supported (uses multiple vNICs over the team).

 

[cyberjock]

LACP + iSCSI is.... stupid. iSCSI + MPIO = win.

If you want HA, that's what TrueNAS is. It will never be in FreeNAS, and if it did it would definitely come with extremely strict hardware configurations that are supported.

I can tell you from about 50+ first-hand experience that with TrueNAS HA, you can failover all day long and the "worst" thing that happens is the VMs locks up for about 5 seconds while ESXi reestablishes the connection to the datastore again. VMs keep running just fine and all is well with them. They just hiccup for a few seconds while ESXi sorts out the datastore side of things.

 

[Clouseau]

I tryed to find informaton on TrueNAS but it difficult to find any information about TrueNAS. Looks like you have to buy the hardware too, but I have my own storages and no need for hardware. I might buy OpedE-DSS Active-Active failover iSCSI storagesoftware. Could not find any other software solution.