Question
What are the requirements for OnApp Storage?
Answer
OnApp Cloud
OnApp Storage functionality is integrated into the release of OnApp Cloud. It therefore requires at least the minimum requirements of the OnApp platform.
Additional disks in hypervisors
OnApp Storage requires additional local disks in hypervisors, beyond those normally required for an OnApp Cloud. It also takes advantage of the diskless "Cloud Boot" feature: as a result, all local storage controllers and disks will be made available to the integrated storage platform. You can attach any SATA, SSD or SAS drive to the local storage controller(s), although SSDs are recommended for best performance.
Network capacity/hypervisor NICs
We recommend assigning as much network capacity as possible to the integrated SAN. If you have spare NICs in your hypervisors you can assign them directly to the storage controller on that node. Note that you must assign at least one SAN NIC for the local VM storage traffic. If you don't have additional NICs, you can bridge the storage controller traffic over this same NIC but with potential loss of performance.
You can continue to access existing datastores on other LUNs over iSCSI/Fibre Channel/ATA over Ethernet. However, note that with the new integrated SAN functionality, OnApp Cloud now requires tighter control over the IP addressing of the local SAN subnet, so you may need to re-ip your existing SAN in order to continue to access LUNs.