[Info-vax] Hypervisors and clusters

[Chris Scheers]

I do not speak for VSI, this is just my personal opinion.

While this does not help you on a Mac, I believe that Hyper-V (Windows) 
has some form of fibre channel emulation.  I have never tried it and do 
not know whether or not it would meet the needs of a VMS cluster.

When the VM does not provide iSCSI support, I have used iSCSI to map 
devices to the host OS and then had the VM access the device as a native 
(non-iSCSI) device.  Whether or not this could be used for a SCSI 
cluster, I don't know.  What are the multi accessor, shared capabilities 
of iSCSI?

As far as DL380s go, I believe that VMS-x64 requires an EFI (or UEFI?) 
BIOS.  So that would require a DL380 Gen 9 or later.  This is a personal 
disappointment as my latest DL380s are Gen 8.



Mark Berryman wrote:
> As far as I know, there are currently only two ways to build a VMS 
> cluster where every node has direct access to storage - either a shared 
> SCSI cluster or using SAN-based storage.
> 
> I can't use a NAS because the only protocols on a NAS that present a raw 
> disk to the host are iSCSI and fibre channel.  If I try to run the iSCSI 
> initiator on a current version VMS, it crashes the system.  If there is 
> a NAS out there that offers fibre channel support usable by VMS, I 
> haven't found it.
> 
> My cluster is currently SAN-based.  That means that all disks are named 
> $1$DGAn:  That means that, in order for a virtual host to join this 
> cluster and have direct access to the storage, the virtual host has to 
> think it is talking to an HBA.  It can't be something mapped to a disk 
> available to the host system.  Are there any hypervisors out there that 
> will pass access to a local HBA directly to the guest host?  If so, does 
> the guest host need a driver for that specific HBA or does the 
> hypervisor map it somehow?
> 
> My specific situation:
> 
> All of my non-VMS systems are Macs.  I have no Windows, Linux, or other 
> systems.  The HBA on the Macs is plugged into a thunderbolt port.  Now, 
> since I doubt thunderbolt support is being added to VMS as part of the 
> port, I'm wondering if a virtual host is going to work for me.
> 
> If so, great.  If not, is it known yet what generations of the DL380 are 
> going to be known to work with VMS 9.1 or 9.2?
> 
> Mark Berryman


-- 
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Chris Scheers, Applied Synergy, Inc.

Voice: 817-237-3360            Internet: chris at applied-synergy.com
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