[PVE-User] HBA raid, storage best practices NFS/ISCSI/NETAPP

[Vincendon Bruno]

Hi,


> 2. end-user has netapp FAS2020A as storage
> So what would be optimal aproach:
>
> 1. from my point of view NFS share (for VMs and proxmox cluster) seems to be
> very good. NFS is native netapp format anyway ...
> but we cannot make online backups (but we could take advantages of netapp
> snapshots ... every day another snapshot of hddxx.raw file)
> 2. if we make iscsi connection to netapp and lvm partition on top of it than we
> can make online backups etc.
>
> So I kindly ask, if somebody , that has tested pros and cons of NFS and ISCSI
> towards netapp storage, can share some expirience and advices
> about this proxmox-storage combination ?
>

We have a fas2020 and we use it on our Proxmox cluster as a NFS server for 
storing VM images(KVM/raw format). For backups, we rely on hourly snapshots 
(while the VMS are running) we did test running a VM (debian with 
apache/php/mysql) with its hourly snapshot and it worked fine (but I would not 
validate this for a critical/high transaction database...).
We do manual coherent backup by stopping the VM, creating a manual snapshot then 
starting the VM (less than a minute). Of course, you've got to manually manage 
the snapshots...

If someone tried and compared the perfs of a VM running with its image on NFS 
and then on ISCSI (with a Netapp) I'd like to hear about the results.

Best regards

Bruno Vincendon