Midway through the year, VMware changed their storage controller certification by requiring all of it to process through their lab, which is a bottle-neck. PERC9 certification, including the H330, is in process but will not likely be approved before Q4. In addition to the H330 having slightly less than a 256 queue depth, VMware is not entirely ready for 12gb SAS, so the testing / validation is taking more time than expected. Keep in mind 13G vSphere support requires v5.5 U2 at the minimum for VSAN (v5.1 U2 will also work, but does not support VSAN). Tom, I’d recommend syncing that customer up with the Solutions Center to do a 13G POC with the H730 if they want to test now. Until we get a successful engineering check on the configuration, I’d be reluctant to tell them what to purchase at present.
On pass-through, the thing you will run into from VMware is them pushing pass-through since it enables single-drive replacement in the event of failure, instead of having to take down an entire node to replace one drive as would be the case for RAID0. Considering it is still difficult to identify the physical location of a failed drive in a VSAN environment without either OME or the OpenManage integration into vCenter, you can argue that either way for the benefits of PERC.
We have a VSAN information guide posted to the documentation for ESXi, out at dell.com/virtualizationsolutions under VMware ESXi v5.x. Page 7 of the VSAN information guide lists the storage controllers we’ve tested, which includes the H710, H710P, and the LSI 9207-8i.
For 11G servers, we have done NO certification of that generation as a “Ready Node”, meaning no Dell engineering has stood up an 11G cluster. The VSAN compatibility list only requires certification of the storage controller, HDDs, and SSDs, so as long as all of those components are there, and the server is v5.5 U1 or higher certified (which most 11G are) VMware at least will support it. VSAN OEM will only be available on 12G and newer.
And, since this is the Blades-Tech forum, I’d restate DAS still isn’t officially supported by VSAN (even if it works), so neither Blades nor VRTX are recommended VSAN targets at present. The next major release of vSphere in 2015 will support JBOD, and we’ll look at certifications again in that time frame.
Damon Earley
Hypervisor Product Marketing
Dell | Product Group – Systems Management
office + 1 800 289 3355 x7242458, direct 1 512 724 2458
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