VirtualBox and DroboElite

Forum History Drobo B800i (DroboElite)
1

I posted this under the VirtualBox forums, but i figured it can’t hurt to have them listed here.

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=33668

What I’m doing is trying to setup a development environment at low cost. I have a few 1U servers which I use as host OS, and they are connecting to the Drobo Elite which holds the guest OS images.

My first attempt thus far is to have separate LUNs per virtual machine. The host OS can than mount the iSCSI LUN when it wants to fire up a test machine, and the .VDI virtual hard disk resides inside (haven’t tried getting VirtualBox to mount the iSCSI directly).

It ain’t super fast, but I’ve got great flexibility for about 10k with this type of setup. Perfect for a small company to setup an OS compatibility lab for software.

What I’m getting issues with however is when I try and mount the virtual drives as SATA in VirtualBox . Doing so crashes my guest OS, and I find that even the drobo goes off-line (can’t access it) from my laptop. Drobo requires a hard reboot.

Workaround is to use the IDE controller that VirtualBox provides (so far, it’s going well). But I find it strange that the entire drobo box crashes hard, and I don’t have a log to tell me what went wrong.

Can anyone help me out here?

2

Just out of curioty, why did U pick Oracle/Sun VirtualBox instead of VMware or MS HyperV for development or DR puprose? I’m sure VirtualBox has its unique feature(s) but compatibilty & post-sales support, are at least 2 of the most critical factors. I hope U r not one of those few shops that invested in Sun/Intel servers!

3

I see you haven’t received an answer from either forum. Your description is an extremely scary scenario to me. I have just recently installed a DroboElite and use it for my very large Exchange 2003 store. My Exchange server has been rock solid for years and only due to a lack of available space did I consider a SAN. I use the SAN exclusively for my Exchange store but I would like to expand its use onto other servers and VMs. If simply mounting a Drobo volume as a SATA drive in a VM could cause the entire Drobo box to fail, I must reconsider how daintily to treat it.

What firmware version are you running? I have 1.0.3 [3.19.29625].