Greetings
I have an interesting challenge in helping out with a design architecture for a client. It involves a scenario that I have never dealt with before, and I don't know if this is "right-in-front-of-my-face" answer or something that is truly complex.
The environment would be a "from-scratch" utilizing ESXi with mutiple VLAN seperation and a NetApp Filer utilizing NFS; environment hosting HPC applications on primarily RHEL.
The challenge lies in a requirement that Web/App servers require simultaneous access to volumes.
My approach in a block storage environment would be to use RDMs, and I am still trying to find out why a simple file server solution won't suffice, but I've been told the VMs MUST mount each volume.
What the current design is proposing is to dual-home VMs to place them on the storage network and access volumes directly on the NetApp. From a functionality perspective, I do not see why this wouldn't work. But dual-homing in 2013, the complexity of introducing another VLAN for each network to access NFS storage... just doesn't seem right.
Anyone tackled a similar issue? Any thoughts around this are appreciated...
Thanks
Greg C.