ESXi 4.1 USB 3.0 External Storage Rotation

[tranquilnet]

We are designing our off site backup plan. We have two physical servers of which we want to attach external storage devices to for data backup and replication.

1) Does any one know if USB 3.0 is supported in ESXi 4.1 and if the actual throughput is anywhere close to 5GB/s?

2) What is the fastest external device that you would recommend to attach

to an ESXi 4.1 host to backup/replicate data on for rotating offsite?

Thanks for your thoughts in advanced.

-Will

www.tranquilnet.com

[tranquilnet]

Note that I accidently posted this discussion twice. Please see:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1583593#1583593

Thanks.

[DSTAVERT · Accepted solution]

ESXi does not support USB 3. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022290

I would look for a NAS device that supports NFS. An NFS device can connect to ESXi hosts as a datastore and can be mounted and dismounted as needed.

[tranquilnet]

Thanks for the confirmation. I am also looking at a direct attached solution using either a PCIe eSATA or Firewire solution. As for the NFS NAS, it is a good idea but my concerns are speed to transfer data from the ESXi host to it and it must be "hot swappable" meaning the ability to simply unplug one and plug in another on a daily basis. Will I have issues with NFS if I do not properly issue an unmount command manually?

Thanks!

[DSTAVERT]

Have a look at http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760

One of the options with this script is to mount and umount an NFS datastore. Mount, capture the virtual machines, umount so it is never a regular datastore. Added plus is the VM can run directly from the NFS.

[tranquilnet]

Thanks for the script link (l love the name of it BTW).

[Jackobli]

How large is the amount of changed daily data?

Thought about a shared storage that supports block based replication?

[tranquilnet]

Shared storage would be great but the data needs to be brought offsite daily. I do not see how we could do that efficeintly (both in cost and the rotation process).

I am leaning towards a $100 eSATA card with a $100 enclosure and 2 x $100 1TB drives attached to an existing host that is not virtualized.

The host will simply act act a NAS with the ability to hot swap drives daily.

Thanks for your suggestions.

[Jackobli]

Shared storage would be great but the data needs to be brought offsite daily. I do not see how we could do that efficeintly (both in cost and the rotation process).

I thought about a shared storage, that allows snapshots and rsync or similiar technology for a block based mirroring over the net.

I don't know how much of your data is changed daily.

I am leaning towards a $100 eSATA card with a $100 enclosure and 2 x $100 1TB drives attached to an existing host that is not virtualized.

The host will simply act act a NAS with the ability to hot swap drives daily.

Be aware, that copying from ESXi to NAS (NFS) may take some time. GBit Ethernet = about 80-100 MByte/s on NFS, but ESXi could limit the performance of the copy process to some lower numbers (4.1 should be faster on NFS, I couldn't prove in real world).

You want to take out the enclosure every day and restore it's data to the disaster site's ESXi? Looks quite time consuming and prone to errors…

[TallyRich]

I'm looking the same way, cost is the major factor, seems to me that eSATA should be directly supported as the SATA card should be recognized by the machine and could be set up as another storage pool. The plan, for now, is to use Veeam FastSCP, script the machines to go down, copy the VM folders to the eSATA drive then turn the VMs back on.

Has anyone had any luck with eSATA and/or USB 3.0 - seems like with it being the new standard it should be supported soon.

[DSTAVERT]

ESXi would not take kindly to hot swapped drives nor will it support just any eSATA card. ESXi does not currently support USB 3 devices. You are far safer with a network attached storage device that will support hot plugging drives. The simplest approach is an unused PC with a simple Linux install or something like Openfiler, FreeNAS, Open-E, Starwind, or other storage software.