[Info-vax] Hypervisors and clusters

[John H. Reinhardt]

On 1/22/2021 8:11 PM, Chris Scheers wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 

Yes.  Robert Brooks has mentioned here many times that it's going to be a Proliant Gen 9 or later that's supported by direct hardware.  I would guess that if you went VMWare or Oracle VirtualBox then a Gen 8 or older might still work but I'm just speculating.

> 
> 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?
>>

I've seen in the VMWare documentation talk about virtual fiber channel ports (NPIV) but I was never able to get them to work on the free versions of ESXi that I'd used. I don't know if it requires their paid SAN product or the vSphere (or whatever it's called now) supervisor node to configure or what.

>> 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
> 
> 


-- 
John H. Reinhardt