Virtual Lefthand cluster within a physical vSphere 4 SANMelody cluster

I set up a test environment way back to be able to test the higher-end features of VMware vSphere 4 as well as ESX 3.5.

By setting up a physical level cluster for the ESX hosts themselves, I was able to perform  vMotion and Storage vMotion migrations with no problems.

I used 3 different ESX hosts.

One was a Dell 2900 server; the other two were my own whitebox creations using nVidia 680i motherboards as the core.  You can find my recommendation for the 680i use on the VMware site here:

For the Storage Area Network component I used Datacore’s SANMelody software running on top of a standalone Microsoft 2008 Server with multiple hard drives. The SANMelody takes a little while to get configured if you’re not already familiar with SAN software, but overall it works well!

Once that was setup and running, I also wanted to be able to test the cluster functionality of Microsoft 2008 Server Enterprise, both R1 and R2 versions. You can see those in the cloud on the left side of the diagram.

HP has a virtual VSA SAN appliance that you can test drive for this very purpose. 

Since it runs as a VM, and the 2008 Servers are also running as VMs, all you need is a virtual switch hooking it all together and you’re good to go.

This SAN-within-a-SAN setup works well for testing and with enterprise class hardware throughout would I believe be a viable setup for production. This would of course depend on what you were running on the servers and how many users, but the concept is there.

**updated April 2010**

I've since replaced the SANMelody in this lab with an Iomega ix2-200d iSCSI RAID 1 unit. You can read about that here. It works great for this setup.

The bottom line for me though was a test environment and for that it has excelled!