I was discussing how to build a home made VSA cluster with Jimmy Dansbo a month ago while he was attending my VMware Install and Configure training course. He showed me some rough stages of his ideas and it was awesome. Jimmy is a very bright and clever guy, he told me he has designed his own OS years ago and I had never any doubt he would create something awesome again. This evening I've received the complete guide which describes how to build a poor mans storage Appliance (pmsApp).
VMware has released their vSphere Storage Appliance which seems like a nice alternative for small and medium sized setups to get shared storage without buying a SAN og NAS. It does however have a few drawbacks. It only runs in VMware. It is kind of expensive (you could probably buy a nice NAS for the same money).
The release of vSphere Storage Appliance did, however, give me the idea of creating a storage Appliance from open source software. The idea for pmsApp was born. The idea is that you have two (or more) virtualization hosts you want to set up in a cluster. This could be VMware ESXi, Proxmox PVE, VirtualBox or any other virtualization platform that is capable of clustering. In order to get a working cluster, you need shared storage, but you only have the local storage in each virtualization node.
VMware has released their vSphere Storage Appliance which seems like a nice alternative for small and medium sized setups to get shared storage without buying a SAN og NAS. It does however have a few drawbacks. It only runs in VMware. It is kind of expensive (you could probably buy a nice NAS for the same money).
The release of vSphere Storage Appliance did, however, give me the idea of creating a storage Appliance from open source software. The idea for pmsApp was born. The idea is that you have two (or more) virtualization hosts you want to set up in a cluster. This could be VMware ESXi, Proxmox PVE, VirtualBox or any other virtualization platform that is capable of clustering. In order to get a working cluster, you need shared storage, but you only have the local storage in each virtualization node.
pmsApp will take local storage on a virtualization host and share it with pmsApp's on the other virtualization hosts to create shared storage that can be given back to the virtualization hosts through iSCSI or NFS. A bit more detail... Each pmsApp will join a HA cluster and export local storage as iSCSI targets. The main pmsApp in the HA cluster will join the exported storage in a sotware RAID and export that as NFS share or iSCSI target that can be used by the virtualization hosts as shared storage.
http://www.pmsapp.org/
