indy1979 Posted June 4, 2013 Share Posted June 4, 2013 Hi all! Picked up a N54L a couple months back and have had ESXi 5.1 on it since then. Now I am thinking about a new direction for this thing. How's this sound for a setup: N54L with 16GB RAM and modified BIOS 2 SSD drives in the ODD bay connected to the extra SATA ports running RAID1 and running Solaris 4 3TB drives configured in Solaris as RAIDZ 4GB QLE220 Fibre Channel HBA in the x16 slot (P2P back to MacPro running ESXi 5.1) Thoughts? Sam Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schoondoggy Posted June 4, 2013 Share Posted June 4, 2013 I have been playing with Storage Server 2012 to turn a N40L into a iSCSI target. Mainly to have a device in my lab that I can centralize storage to and boot servers from. Why are you using FC? Do you have the switches to support it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indy1979 Posted June 4, 2013 Author Share Posted June 4, 2013 The current setup I have is an old server running FreeNAS (slow, I know) over Gb ethernet. There is some definite lag on the VMs when multiple machines are runnings. May be the network getting saturated or FreeNAS. I figure FC because its something I need to learn. For right now, it's just the 2 machines, so I will be going point to point w/o switching. If I add another microserver, then I'll pick up an eBay switch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ikon Posted June 4, 2013 Share Posted June 4, 2013 You gotta figure this is the only N54L that has ever had FibreChannel in it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indy1979 Posted June 29, 2013 Author Share Posted June 29, 2013 Ok, so a little update. I have installed Solaris 11 on an SSD connected to the ODD SATA connection on the MB. I couldn't get the eSATA port to be available for RAID on the SSDs, so there will just be one per server. I have found that the Emulex LPe11000 and LPe11002 fibre channel HBA cards fit quite nicely. Solaris recognized them immediately and I was able to configure them as a FC target and present a LUN on them. Only problem so far is that it appears that ESXi will not support a direct FC connection. I have to pick up a switch. Not a big deal. Once the switch comes I'll update again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ikon Posted June 29, 2013 Share Posted June 29, 2013 I have to pick up a switch. Not a big deal. Really? Have FC switches come down that much in price? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schoondoggy Posted June 29, 2013 Share Posted June 29, 2013 ESX needs to see a fabric. There are lots of used switches out there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indy1979 Posted June 30, 2013 Author Share Posted June 30, 2013 ESX needs to see a fabric. There are lots of used switches out there. Yeah, figured VMWare wouldn't make things easy... I just picked up a Silkworm 200e FC switch with a few SFPs for $125, so they can be had for a good deal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ikon Posted June 30, 2013 Share Posted June 30, 2013 That really is a LOT cheaper than they used to be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jpsj Posted July 24, 2013 Share Posted July 24, 2013 Awesome read, this has inspired me. Just picked up a LPe11000 on eBay (auction was ending 2 minutes after reading this thread ) Gonna get myself another LPe11000 for my second N40L and play with some fibre! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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