Hello, I'm looking to build a CentOS server (or servers) with a SAN to support a large user base.
I apologize for this, but I'd feel I'd be professionally negligent if I didn't at least point it out. If you have $25K to spend, and can afford recurring costs of $1-2K/year, then I'd highly recommend RHEL AS for the support aspects.
I'm interested mainly what hardware and software is best
supported by
the OS, but anything you have to say on the subject is welcome.
The HCL will at least cover the hardware compatibility aspects. RHEL AS comes with come clustering-failover capability when devices are attached to the same SAN.
I would really need to know what sort of topology you are considering, as well as the main uses of your servers/storage.
Be careful when buying from RH. We built a SAN solution with GFS using their engineers to spec their own software this last year. They did not know that it required !3! boxen running GFS in order to guarantee continuous access to the SAN in case of a single machine failure.
While we have it running and stable now, the problem was very serious in the beginning and RH was of literally no help at all. We paid for support but found out they have ONE qualified GFS engineer in the whole company.
-jeff