Running IBM FS5030H with VMware ESXi & Proxmox - 1022

IBM has sponsored this video. This new FlashSystem 5030H Storage box. is a bit to high end for home use. A great use for it could be, storage for a virtualized business environment. In this video, I set it up on VMware ESXi and Proxmox. I run in to all kind of obstacles and challenges, but in the end I do get through, but there is for sure also room for improvement in my setup :-)

I also got a lot out of looking at IBM Redbook on "IBM FlashSystem 5000 Family Products"
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[Stephen-bncj]

Hi Morten 👍

It must be very nice to have IBM as a sponsor with you being such a huge fan of theirs 👍👍

Loving the videos man

[hariranormal]

beautiful. I hope my friend can have these in his rack if our business goes off!

[atomsbudgetreviews]

Very awesome storage unit. I also have speed issues with 10Gbe. Look into getting a rack mount Mikrotik 10Gbe switch.. they are about $300 US for an 8 port model. SFP+ dual pcie cards roughly $30 a piece. Fiber channel cable is really cheap as well.. unless you want to run Cat6a instead but it's more $ ..

[Astra]

You don't have to use FibreChannel Switches. You could also direct-attach a single host to the FS5030. You would just need 4 FC ports on the host.

[adrianalanis]

Hi Morten, by any chance do you have an IBM Power server? Will be great if you have one, if you could show the performance of those. Thanks for your videos !

[nelizmastr]

What are you using that Server 2003 machine for? Always fun to see old server systems still in use.

[HuMaNiTaRiAn]

Hello morten, You fell into the exact problem i have with my xg-16! I also cannot get all 4 ports to run at 10gbe over the RJ45. I believe its a hardware fault on the RJ45 ports with models less than hardware revision 5 on that switch, after v5 they changed the rj45 ports with different ones and my specific problem went away. Unfortunately I'm just past their incredibly short 1yr warranty on it! The way I worked around it is I only have 2 or 3 ports plugged in. Normally 1&4 or 1, 3&4 - That enables me to keep a 10gb link up without it failing back to 1gb. Any more and it would exhibit packet loss and the link would either die completely, requiring me to force 1gbe.
There's a 10gbe microtik switch with more rj45 ports around the same price, I will be upgrading to that once I have some spare funds after xmas.

[erikbraun]

Love the video, and hope I will once have such a server room.

[electrocyper]

Hi Morten! Have you tried connecting the storage directly to the host? This will eliminate the switch, which for some reason does not negotiate with the storage on 10 gigabits.

[thecomputertech]

Hi Morten. As long as you were connecting to the 10GB IP Address that was assigned on the SAN then in theory it should be communicating at 10GB Speeds and you wouldn’t have needed to connect any other cables. Then you should have seen the speed increase. I wonder if your proxmox hosts was communicating to the 1GB Nic / IP Address and you just needed to connect to the 10GB instead ? Can you link me to the 10GB SFP+ modules ?

[dasiro]

although it seems like jak stak is on to something with the multiple RJ45-connections limiting the speed to 1Gb per port (it might be a backplane limitation), if gigabit networking was the true limiting factor, then you should have maxed it out at 125MB/s, not 80, which is way too low even including overhead, certainly on this type of equipment.

[rschrader]

Two things: 1) have you ever tried WinDirStat before? From what you showed of Space Monger, WinDirStat’s graphical representation of the files on a drive is much better. 2) Just curious how often you upgrade your Unifi controller and the firmware on your Unifi equipment? Perhaps a Unifi upgrade video in the future? Cheers...

[bhaskarnath]

Sir I think your network connections is ok ..Plz monitoring the storage iops .

[DjIONY]

Cable 6A or Cable 6E Category and Jumbo Frame enable for 10Gbps or 40 Gbps. I Like This video. :)

[DavidCooperGB]

There was no free PCIe slot for an SFP+ NIC on the IBM storage server?

[HomelabExtreme]

Fibre channel is very much entry compatible, it's not just for high-end enterprises.
There are many SMB entry SANs on the market, i personally have a lot of experience with the HPE MSA family.

Fibre channel does do PTP, meaning point-to-point, there is no need for a switch, so you could just have thrown a 8Gb FC HBA in the server, and run active-active giving you a 16Gb full-duplex link to the SAN, that would have been much better than even 10G iSCSI anyway.

The price of that system actually is pretty cheap, i think the HPE equivalent would be slightly more expensive.
Just a single 1.92TB 3PAR SSD, is more than that complete system - just for scale.

[phreapersoonlijk]

Hey Morten, I enjoyed your video a couple months back where you were working on that new 'hall' thingy on that house that used to be a little shop or something, I believe.
How did that turn out?

[markman]

Hey, ist there a problem with You having cables connected on different nodes ?

[leonardotoschi]

6:15 if you are in enterprise and do a 1 Gb volume instead of 1 Tb

[lpseem]

And I only recently got a gigabit rack switch. I think that IBM storage unit would laugh at me with a fast ethernet and just refused to power on. :)