Hi all,
I am due to start a new job in the next fortnight - the short story is that these guys are running a decent-sized LAMP-backed eCommerce website (national exposure with media/TV coverage) and currently rent servers from a third party. As a result, their hosting costs are huge and they're looking to bring things in-house.
My current headache with planning any installation is storage. I'm planning a four-node cluster with DRS and dvSwitches to simplify things (I'm going to be the only sysadmin managing things), and potentially a split-tray storage solution (SSDs for database, SAS for regular storage). Networks would be totally separate, so storage would sit on its own switches/cabling and likewise for vMotion/management/VM traffic - NICs would also be separate with a dedicated NIC/HBA for storage traffic.
Given that I'm going to be starting from scratch, what are people's thoughts on 10GbE iSCSI vs 16Gb FC storage? The issue isn't necessarily "which is faster" (I don't want this to turn into an opinion-fight), but more "which is more appropriate for our scenario":
- Is FC overkill for a LAMP application?
- Which is the more scalable soluition?
- Which is the easiest to configure?
- Would it be better to go for a dual-protocol offering (e.g. use FC for SSD storage and iSCSI for HDDs)?
- For iSCSI, would it be better to buy a dedicated iSCSI HBA vs using a dedicated dual-port 10GbE NIC?
Opinions from anyone who has run large LAMP applications on vSphere would be awesome!