AS6808T queries

[adrien]

Hi, I am new here. Looking at this unit as a replacement for an aging Dell MD3600i. So I love the 2x10GBE, and also M.2 storage. Anyway, here are my questions.

1. There is mentioned a PCIe expansion slot. Is this already used by the 4xm.2 drives or can you add additional m.2 drives? I note there is a setting whether the expansion slot is drives or network. Is this applying to the existing m.2 slots? IOW do you lose the m.2 drives if you wanted to put another lan interface here?

2. Are the front drives hot-swappable?

3. Can you have more than 1 volume per storage pool? I need a small witness volume for my cluster and it only needs to be 5GB, I don't want to lose a whole drive to it. I'll be using iSCSI, so maybe just need a couple of LUNs on the volume?

4. can multiple iSCSI clients connect to the same LUNs simultaneously? This is necessary for failover clustering.

thanks in advance.

[snapshot]

1. The M.2 daughterboard does use the PCIe slot. The AS-T10G3 card combines a 10GbE NIC and two M.2 slots so you 'only' lose two if you need a third 10GbE port.

2. Yes

3. ADM does not use storage pools, only volumes. So a group of disks, set up as a RAID, cannot be partitioned into multiple volumes. I don't know if iSCSI will help here.

4. Pass. I know nothing about iSCSI.

[adrien]

thank you!

I had a look through the online demo of ADM 5, and it looks like you can solve the multi-volume issue with iSCSI, as you can specify the underlying volume and size when you create a LUN.

I don't need a 3rd 10GBE port, was hoping maybe for more m.2 slots. But with a big enough RAID 10 volume you can saturate 20Gbit anyway even with 6Gbit SATA drives.