V13 Appliance Questions

[8106karlsson]

Is it possible to connect a DAS storage device (with hardware raid) with USB-C to a physical VSA 13 appliance and use as repository?
And in that case, will the default repo expand to this one also (LVM) or can it be configured as a separate destination?

[Gostev]

Yes, any DAS should work.

You can never have any storage separate i.e. not a part of the LVM volume.

[8106karlsson]

OK thanks.
What will happen to repo if DAS ges temporary disconnected? If it was a separate volume, I guess it would work fine after reconnection.
But when it is a part of one LVM?

[Gostev]

I guess the LVM volume will go offline and fail to mount but never tried that. For sure you should avoid that, honestly this makes as much sense as talking about disconnecting one of the fuel tanks for the aircraft that is already airborne (it will crash even before it runs out of fuel due to imbalance).

[8106karlsson]

I am just exploring some setup alternatives. It should of course not be disconnected, I just wonder what happens if it does.
Compare with VMware host and SAN where you use separate datastore for SAN. But I understand that because it is by design that there is only one LVM and it gets expanded, I guess there is a substantial risk for corrupted volume if it gets disconnected.

[Gostev]

Software appliance is built on self-contained, monolithic principle so it expects monolithic storage architecture:

1/ A single physical server with a boot device and one or more RAID groups, with all latter joined together with LVM. This is because bigger server chassis that support a ton of HDDs require multiple RAID controllers due to each one usually supporting only up to 32 lines, thus the need for joining them all together into a single volume for more efficient disk space usage.

2/ Same but further extended with DAS JBODs for even more capacity.

As you can see, none of these configs are "volatile" and it is not seriously possible that some parts of storage will connect or disconnect randomly.