Before you deploy any updated software, it’s important to test it in a lab first. DataCore recently released the newest version of its software, SANsymphony-V.
First things first, you will need a hypervisor, I am using Hyper-V since it is included in Windows 8 and 8.1 as a part of the OS. Once that is installed, you’ll need to configure your networking. Seeing as I don’t have fibre channel cards in my laptop, this will be an iSCSI set up.
What will be needed are two iSCSI networks, a network for the GUI and configuration updates between DataCore nodes, two mirror networks, and a virtual machine traffic network that is able to access the internet (not required, but it makes things easier).
Once all of your virtual networks are set up, we can move on to the next part. To test high availability and actual host connections, you will need a total of three virtual machines. My lab consists of two Server 2012 R2 virtual machines that will have DataCore installed, and one Server 2012 R2 virtual machine that will serve as our host receiving storage. For the purposes of the lab and saving space, I have just created one master VHD fully patched with Server 2012 R2 and use differencing disks for the three virtual machines.
Next, you are going to need some storage to give the DataCore virtual machines to serve out to our test host. I am making four VHDs on my SSD drive and two VHDs on my standard hard drive so I can test the auto-tiering and disk pooling features. Once all is said and done, you’ll have VHDs that look similar to what I have below.
Once we’ve got the virtual machines created, we’ll want to attach all the hard drives, networks, and set up RAM and vCPU for them as follows.
After all this is done we’ll want to go into each VM and map out the networks appropriately.
iSCSI1 network will be 10.0.10.0/24
iSCSI2 network will be 10.0.20.0/24
Mirror1 network will be 10.0.1.0/24
Mirror2 network will be 10.0.2.0/24
InterDCS network will be 1.1.1.0/24
After all is said and done, make sure that your two DataCore servers can talk to each other and talk to the test host. Now you can begin to serve up virtual disks and check out the new features in version 10.
Some of the new features include:
- An improved the algorithm to increase the number of threads dedicated to servicing I/O as the load increases, eliminating the need to rebuild the entire pool when specific storage allocation units have a failure
- Improved disk pool heat map,
- Added counters for bandwidth display,
- Qualified 40 and 56 GigE Ethernet,
- Support for up to 32 DataCore servers per Server Group