What's the best Storage solution for a Suse Xen implementation of 2 Mirrored Servers iSCSI, Fibre or SAS?
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well, the hardware / OS / software part is only the… foundation
of server implementation. at least as important if not more, is what those servers will be used for:
-1- are they a testbed for a production implementation?
-2- will they factually become production servers after a while?
-1- if this is going to be your (personal) playground, you may want to choose a "local solution" such as an iSCSI cabinet or whatever else DELL has to offer, locally, over which you have total control
-1.5- if it is going to be a testbed for a production system, you may consider that Xen in particular, Virtual Machine in general are still somewhat bleeding edge technology and it might come in handy to have a test (development?) environment which is using the same storage technology as the production environment
-2- this will become a production system, eventually.
you certainly want to choose the same storage technology that is in use for other servers in your company, or, if there aren’t yet, take into consideration what requirements your company has (central backup, high availability aso.).
generally speaking, a storage solution on the net, independent of any server (OS) would be your preferred solution. maintaining (Hardware) and administrating (backup aso.) local storages becomes a nightmare at the latest after the 3rd server.
keep in mind that currently virtualisation isn’t part of the hight availability credo, yet. it’s a way to squeeze more servers (software) on existing hardware. especially connectivity software such as load balancing and fail over may still depend too much on the hardware to run smoothly in a virtual environment.