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2 storage servers and a watch server

Hi,

Is it possible to have 2 SSD storage servers (12 TB) and a third watch/monitoring server without a data storage?

Yes you can un-check the "Local Storage Service" role on the node that you do not want serving storage.

More precisely, there are 3 roles a node can perform:

1) Management and Monitoring

2) Local Storage

3) iSCSI Target

The first is non-optional for the first 3 nodes.

The second and third are optional and be can unselected / selected at runtime.

So would it be possible to have have 2 ESXi servers,  have 2 'Local Storage' nodes on each but and say the 3rd server (M&M only) as another VM?

Would assume that if a ESXi host fails, then may lose quorum?  Would need to run Vmware FT to ensure the 3rd node is always available on either host (so 2 nodes are always available)?

We currently run Starwind in a 2 node arrangement and wondering if this might be a suitable replacement 🙂

 

running your third monitor in FT/HA under VMWare would do, another option is running it on any third/extra ESX you have..it requires very low system resources so you can fit the vm in a low end ESX  while the first 2 storage machines that house the storage would be more powerful boxes.

to setup FT/HA will require the vm to  use a SAN based datastore rather than local storage. Trying to use PetaSAN as datastore for its quorum vm will probably not work.

 

 

Thanks for the response.  2 box clusters are great for ROBO and in our case, supplying redundant services away from our primary SAN in case of failure.

If I get the chance, will test and advise.

Would imagine if the ESXi host dies that is hosting the storage for the 3rd M&M service, and that host was also providing the storage/iscsi endpoint for that VM, any disk access will fail until the paths migrate over to the other host/VM Ceph storage server.

I feel that as long as no disk access is required on that witness to complete the storage failover, then it would work 🙂