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Preface - I'm not a storage architect, correct me where I'm wrong, please. Specifically I'm an AIX admin but work in VmWare and windows a fair amount. So, traditionally, for storage in the enterprise you wire up LC fiber channel fiber to the HBAS of your hosts, using multipathing, often via proprietary software like EMC's PowerPath. You zone the SAN to the WWID of the HBAs, mask a LUN, VmWare or your AIX server will see it, and you make a datastore or volume group out of it. I'm sort of curious on how you can boot AIX from NFS, like you can boot Windows guests off NFS with VmWare, and in what case that'd be a good idea. So, VmWare, you would just add a NFS type datastore. Over 10gig ethernet, this would perform pretty decent I imagine, perhaps rivaling native fiber channel if built well. AIX, storage virtualization gets kind of strange. AIX, you have what's called a VIO server. You could build two VIO LPARs, each having a different path to the SAN. You can do NPIV passthrough and give the guest lpars virtual HBAs and do traditional multipathing over NPIV. Or, you can create virtual scsi disks and combine them into volume groups on the guest LPARs, ensuring the volume group is properly mirrored. You can lose either VIO server, one at a time, redundancy is preserved in such a scenario. I've never used VIO in production, but have done some testing and it's fairly straightforward. Also, there's what's called a NIM server, this can serve SPOT resources which would allow LPARS to boot via NFS and TFTP, you can host diskless systems off of NIM. I imagine performance would be pretty good, especially if you are utilizing something like the onboard HEA on a frame. Do people actually use NIM like this in production, and where would you build your redundancy in so you can occasionally reboot the NIM server without taking down all the diskless clients it's hosting? At some point we will replace our Power 770s with newer frames. I literally have no one to bounce these ideas off of, being the sole AIX administrator in a group full of Windows admins. I'm curious if I should be looking at VIO or even NIM diskless clients. Likely when the time comes I'll just get a handful of hours purchased with our IBM partner to discuss these things with, but curious what's out there in the wild, if anyone works on these types of systems.
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May 29, 2014 04:09
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Playing with that Power 770 is probably a lot of fun, I might be able to refer you to someone else. Check your PMs.
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May 30, 2014 16:17
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