Today I found some interesting technical details during my installation of Cisco UCS for the client. FCoE architecture are slightly different when you decide to uplink the FCoE traffic end to end to the Cisco Nexus 5000 unified fabric, or you are doing the FC uplink directly from the UCS 6120 to the MDS or SAN fabric switches. I went through the documentation and my previous round of installation, we were actually configure the LAN & SAN uplink from UCS 6120 to Nexus 5k. Therefore, in our configuration, we required to have specified FCoE VLAN which carry the FCoE traffic to reach the storage through Nexus 5000. Today, I implemented the similar configuration, but the different was the uplink configuration.
This new setup are included with 10 G Ethernet uplink from UCS 6120 to Catalyst 6509 through Fiber, and utilizing FC Uplinks from UCS 6120 to MDS 9124. In my test, I removed the VLAN that I created purposely for FCoE, and found that there are no impact to the configuration. I had confirmed with the support guys that if you are doing an uplink with FC from UCS 6100 to MDS, you will not require to tag the specified VLAN that created for the VSAN in the configuration.
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There had been numbers of review and discussion regarding the choices of storage for us to run on Virtual Environment today. I believed that the hot discussion is always moving talk about the right storage with right design and implementation to the VM farm always. The most hottest topic are still regarding the NFS, ISCSI and FC implementation which provide better features, performance and reliability.
Personally, I had 3 of it running in my environment now and of course, I had spent a huge number of times to really test out all the solution and compare apple to apple to further study of my requirement. Here are some reading I get from my test for 3 solution above.
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Recently I run some stress test on our VMware farm due to the prove of concept we try on some new products and I have some finding would like to share.
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Personally, I just initiated the prove of concept with the local vendor in our environment regarding the Xsigo Virtual I/O integration into our existing Network, Fiber Channel and ESX 3.5 Virtualization server. I would like to share some of my finding which I think may be useful for reference purpose.
Before the approach on Xsigo, I am actually working on the new design plan to improve the performance and capabilities of the existing virtual infrastructure for the large scale virtualization in our environment. I am actually think about the Cisco director switch on Fiber channel and the network switches of 6509 with 10Gb module, but the cost of doing this, is really going to kill us for the current economy down turn. Suddenly, I been introduce by my buddy with this brand new products which I setup the POC now and I found that is more make sense to look in this product to unlock the under utilize bandwidth in our DC include both Network and Fiber Channel.
Advantages:
- HCA is cheaper than HBA as we may need 2 HBA per server for redundancy purpose, which only provide 8Gb bandwidth, the HCA will provide 20Gb per HCA, which will be powerful enough for virtualization purpose.
- HCA will combine both network and fiber channel capabilities, reduce cabling requirement and improve bandwidth utilization.
- With Vnic and Vhba, we will able to create and utilize existing available bandwidth by reduce the number of FC and Network switches in the Data Center.
- I will able to reduce the cabling from 18 to 2 HCA connection per ESX in my environment
I am currently stress test the performance on the Xsigo chassis on our ESX, interesting that it will not sacrifice the performance as it able to perform as same as the previous configuration we done. Now, it provide the opportunity for me to utilize the FC ports in my Data Center without increase the number of FC switches, which is currently 95% utilize. Imagine, with 4Gb FC for HBA, except the high performance database server, we will not able to utilize the storage bandwidth on each FC ports. Same time, the gigabit network, will not be consume for more than 10% most of time, will provide more resources for the system which require extra bandwidth in the data center. Xsigo has the intelligent to manage the bandwidth and assign as needed.
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Economy Crisis this year has encouraged users to consider the ISCSI SAN Vs FC SAN today. Data Storage growth will never stop unless the business is stop. In order to keep the environment growth, the IT architect will have to provide a cost effective solution in the finance critical timing like now.
Performance wise, we may know that the Equallogic ISCSI might not beat the huge SAN box which easily cost you double as your TCO on ISCSI. I would like to share my finding relevant on the features it bundle with Dell Equallogic. In FC SAN, we are able to achieve performance and functionality, which require always additional license cost and expensive infrastructure to support it. Today, ISCSI provide more flexibility in term of FC due to the common understanding we all have on the IP technology which we deal with it everyday.
In Equallogic ISCSI, you will entitle every features which bundle together with the storages you purchase.
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