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This is the first time I've used Redhat Enterprise Virtualisation Manager & Redhat Hypervisor, after normally going the more home grown approach of a group of Redhat/CentOS KVM hosts. Our SAN device works over ATA-over-ethernet (AoE) to provide what looks like a block level storage device direct to the machine.

This is fine in the case where I have physical console access to a full fledged Operating System. But when it's the simple hypervisor, I only seem to be able to connect to network (NFS) or iSCSI level storage.

Is this even possible from RHEVM?

Thanks in advance

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Is this a Coraid box? Is there a reaons why you wouldn't use a more common protocol, or is this academic? –  Chopper3 Jul 31 '12 at 17:30
Thanks all, good to get a solid answer! Looking for a solution with NFS or not using RHEV, probably not the most elegant, but we'll see! –  kwiksand Aug 1 '12 at 0:28
Any Linux box will give you both NFS and iSCSI –  dyasny Aug 1 '12 at 6:50
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4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

RHEVM only supports NFS, FC or iSCSI for shared storage.

You could use RHEL as the hypervisor instead of the tiny hypervisor image and you will be able to login to it and configure it normally. If you're lucky, it'll be treated as FC.

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Hi Mikey, I've done a lot of reading on this tonight, can you get a normal RHEL6 install to act as a hypervisor to a RHEV-M installation, I didn't think so. However if this was possible it would be great! –  kwiksand Aug 1 '12 at 0:29
It is possible, did you read the docs? RHEV supports both RHEV-H and RHEL hosts as hypervisors. access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en-US/… –  dyasny Aug 1 '12 at 6:55
Yea, looked into this approach too, but it looks like RHEV still doesn't support storage local to hypervisor (as opposed to network accessed). –  kwiksand Aug 3 '12 at 10:53
Yes it does. You can use local storage in RHEV 3.0 and newer –  dyasny Aug 7 '12 at 16:37
However, it will be treated as local storage so you will lose the benefits of shared storage (HA, migration, etc). –  MikeyB Aug 8 '12 at 14:20
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While AoE is not supported, RHEV really works with device-mapper-multipath under the hood. So if you see a LUN, mapped in /dev/mapper, RHEV will be able to use it, defined as FC.

I wouldn't recommend this in production of course, but if you handle the target logins manually, and the hosts are able to see the block storage via multipath, RHEV should work, and should allow you to at least give it a spin. I repeat - NOT for production.

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AoE is neither supported in such a configuration so you'll be ending with a kludge nor recommended in general. TCP overhead is a myth. We're not in 2001 any more :) iSCSI is a way to go.

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we use coraid AOE storage devices and are implementing RHEV-M/H. The Coraid storage devices will be accessed with a nfs server exporting the volume. all 10G...

You can go with RHEL and either compile the open source aoe drivers your self, or use Coraid's rpm packages for their HBA's (10g). This option is not available for RHEV...yet.

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