Shutting down the VSAs – Cleanly

Power off the VSA via the Central Management Console (CMC).

Highlight the management group select shutdown group

Select to shutdown all nodes

This will shutdown the VSA cleanly,

Low cost fully featured shared storage solution

The VSA  Virtual Storage Appliance from LeftHandNetworks for VMware ESX creates VMFS storage using the unused white space on the local ESX host. By virtualizing the internal disk capacity of the VMware ESX host server and clustering the storage across different ESX hosts, the VSA will give me all the features of an expensive SAN but without the cost

 

The evaluation download is a 30-day, fully functional evaluation edition for VMware ESX capable of supporting up to 2TB per node. Each VSA requires 1GB of RAM and at least 5GB of disk space.

 

Differences between the licensed and unlicensed version

 

All SAN/iQ® features can be used for a trial period of 30 days.

 

After 30 days, volumes will be disconnected if any licensed features are in use. 

 

Licensed features include:

• • Clustering
• • Snapshots
• • Remote Copy
• • Multi-Site SANs
  

The VSA can be used for free indefinitely as a single node iSCSI target without snapshots or remote copy however If a configuration (management group) is deleted and recreated the 30 days trial period of licensed features starts again

 

With my lab i will be looking at

 

• Creating storage clusters
• Creating and thin provision volumes
• Replicate of data data (between clusters)
• Test server virtualization HA features with integrated storage failover/failback

 The appliance can be downloaded at

 

 http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/vsa_eval.aspx