How Many…

The VSA testing is taking longer than I intended. At the moment, I've got six installed but under VMWare workstation, not ESXi as originally intended. Early next month, I'm going to get an ESXi supported SATA card so that I can start testing properly. The Virtual Storage Appliances are as follows

Sun Unified Storage Simulator: Supports both iSCSI and NAS. Easy install, no time limit. Standard install is capacity limited but I think is easily hackable to go higher by changing the size of the virtual disks.

Open Filer: Supports both iSCSI and NAS. Easy install, no time limit. Not capacity limited.

NetApp Filer: Supports both iSCSI and NAS. Not strictly a VSA and you install on top of a Linux build. NetApp could do with shipping it as a proper VSA. Severely capacity limited. Good for playing with OnTap but not a serious tool. Only downloadable by NetApp customers!

Nexenta: Supports both iSCSI and NAS. Comes in a variety of versions; I'm using the developer's edition which is not time limited. Easy install, no time limit. Capacity limited at 1 Terabyte.

Lefthand VSA: Supports iSCSI only. Comes in OVF format, needed to use VMWare convertor to get it into a format useable by VMWare Workstation. Install has a gotcha, need to make the virtual disk you are going to use to store data on sit on SCSI id 1:0 or it won't pick it up. Time limited and only supports a single virtual disk but you can change the size of this, supports capacity up to 2 Tb.

EMC Celerra VSA: Supports both iSCSI and NAS. Pig of an install initially, no time limit. Not capacity limited as far as I can see. Chad's blog is a really great place for information and general tips on how to get the most out of your virtual Celerra. He needs to be applauded for the work he has done here.

I've just registered for the FalconStor appliance and I'll see if they come back with an okay. I can't see why they won't.

Early feel on the performance is that the Sun and Nexenta VSA's are easily the fastest; both are based on Solaris with ZFS. All of the VSA's are useable tho' but NetApp need to step up a bit; repackage and support increased capacity.

Certainly in the SMB space, this is going to be an interesting area but I can see potential in VMWare environments as well where a VSA could be provisioned per blade enclosure for example keeping I/O in the enclosure.

If any vendors reading this have any more VSAs they want to tell me about, I'd be happy to look at them and if any of them want to give me a registration key so that I don't run out of time, it'll save me re-installing.

I've also been toying with my own 'VSA' build using Linux but not only does it support iSCSI and NAS; it also has the OpenFCoE code as well. It's ummm…fun, however I wouldn't trust it with my data let alone yours!