Malaysia VMware Communities » ISCSI

FCoE in the Data Center

craig — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:55:44 +0000

FCoE is new today for data center environment, but it will be very soon adopt by most of the users in 2 years time. If we look at the current environment in most data center today, there will be isolated environment of FC connection for Storage and Ethernet connection for networking purpose in every single data center. Cabling management and knowledge require to keep the environment running and organize is becoming more challenging from time to time. Well, with the FCoE technology from Cisco, it will definitely simplify everything for us.

FCoE reduce the number of cabling require to be managed in the data center by replacing the traditional FC and Ethernet cable with CNA cards and nexus switches. In additional to that, ISCSI and NFS had become better and we have seen the storage vendor like Netapp which deliver the promises of performance over the IP base environment. FCoE will bring a lot of benefits to the virtualization host, especially when you plan to have ISCSI, NFS and FC SAN to be connected to the same ESX host.

NFS ISCSI and FC Storage on vSphere

craig — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:39:10 +0000

NFS, ISCSI and FC storage are all supported in VMware vSphere today. As some of the benchmark been done recently showed the performance of ISCSI and NFS had been improved versus ESX version 3.5. In the benchmark report it show that the overhead on NFS and ISCSI were higher VS FC storage. With the latest processors chip from Intel and AMD, I believe the overhead on the CPU will not be the major concern as users are always considering to maximize the usage of the CPU power they have in the physical server.

We had been running Vmware in our environment for more than 2 years now in production mode and found that 80% of our production virtual machine should easily could be handled on either NFS and ISCSI. I will suggest to have FC and IP SAN in place within the virtual infrastructure. This will allow the administrator to select the right storage option to support the IO requirement for each system been hosted in VMware. The mission critical and high IO requirements systems will be deployed on the FC SAN, but the low IO requirement virtual machines will be migrated to IP SAN. With the storage vMotion option in vSphere 4, this will able to be done with zero down time. At cost perspective, it will make the hosting package to be more competitive to support the customer need.

Performance tuning on Virtual Infrastructure with MD3000i

craig — Mon, 25 May 2009 07:07:56 +0000

With the recent experience I had on the deployment with vSphere 4 and PowerVault MD3000i, I found there are plenty of room you may able to further fine tune to improve the performance of the storage and virtual infrastructure. Before this, the initial deployment was done by default configuration without any fine tune yet, and I found that the storage performance looks little bit slow. Therefore, I had decided to further research and fine tune everything we had to improve the performance.

Equipment List

2 x R710 with Intel 5530
2 x PowerConnect 5424
MD3000i with 15 SATA Disks
Software ISCSI initiator from vSphere 4

I was impressed with the functionality of the Dell PowerConnect switch which provide the important features as link aggregation, jumbo frames, ISCSI optimization and etc. Here is what I did. I had enable the jumbo frame on the specify port that connected for the storage and ISCSI connectiones. At the same time, I had also turned on the MTU configuration and jumbo frame setting from the MD3000i management console. You may need to repeat the same action for every data ports that provided by the storage controller on MD3000i. Enable the Jumbo frame and configure the MTU value of 9000 on it. On the PowerConnect switch,I had configured the specify ports on ISCSI optimization and jumbo frames enable. Now it come to the vSphere level, which I had to manually enable the ISCSI vswitch to support the jumbo frame and put in the right value for the MTU.

Command for reference

#esxcfg-vswitch -l
This will allow you to list all the virtual switch you have on the ESX server

#esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 vswitch1
this command is to enable the mtu value of 9000 for every nics that connected to the same virtual switch which provide the storage access to ISCSI

#vmkping -s 9000 192.x.x.x
test the jumbo frame setting

The outcome of the jumbo frame enable, I had able to achieve higher throughput on the MD3000i I had and I am happy with the performance of the storage.

FC NFS ISCSI

craig — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:29:26 +0000

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.

For I/O performance, I am using the IO meter as to generate the max output to the storage. I manage to get 190MB/s for my FC storage on 100 % read, and I only managed to get the output of 170MB/s on ISCSI, but on NFS, I only managed to get at 125MB/s. If we look at the number here, and compare to my high load R900 ESX host, actually it is more than enough to handle the number of VM I have in the ESX host. There are a lot of article introduce NFS, and the features of Netapps, but remember, ESX itself had improved from time to time. Thin Provisioning is no longer new thing, as you may get it with many vendor today by free as well as volume snap. But Dedupe will still be an interesting technology in netapps. If we look at FC, you will mostly lose all this technology, but it provide a stable performance as you need to virtualize some heavy environment moving forward. I am currently still test out the storage solution before I decide to go with a final choice. I will suggest to keep an eye on the technology trend as we may also remember that the VMware ESX 4 is on the way, which may change the game of storage strategy significantly.

DELL Equallogic PS5500E Auto Snapshot Manager

craig — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:30:13 +0000

The latest version of ISCSI SAN Equallogic PS 5500E which launched recently had provide better capacity, performance, extra functionalities and more spindles in arrays. It could be support both 500GB and 1TB SATA II spindles up to 48 drives in a single array of 4U. A very impress usable storage space in single array which up to 48TB in raw. If we compare to the capacity, it is hardly found that a single array would provide a huge capacity at 48TB in Raw today. In additional to that, DELL had provide all the necessary features as for storage management as free which integrated as part of the storage purchase for Dell Equallogic ISCSI SAN. The latest features is regarding the Snapshot Manager for VMware. Previous version is only supported on Microsoft environment, but now, it had also supported on VMWare environment.

This features provide more option which will allow the users to snapshot, backup, and restore the files, volume, VM or even a single file that you need. Many of us may think about using the VCB for our VM backup today, the Dell Equallogic had provide some interesting package which allow us to avoid of VCB in our environment, and provide better backup and restoration process.

If we talk about disk base backup, which is VTL, it always cost involve in term of disk space and software licenses. With the latest features from Equallogic, we will able to avoid the extra investment require on VTL, but provide the similar functionalities on disk base backup, and from disk to tape backup. If I bought the equallogic previously and sign up with the maintenance, I entitle the upgrade of the new features today. It will be a excellent surprise for my investment. As economy crisis, IT budget is been tight and require to work smarter, this should be a great news for the consumers. Personally, I will still say that the 10Gbe will be my option as to get rid of the fiber channel storage that we current use for VMware. As 48 spindles in a single array, we may need the bigger through put from the array to reach the client always.

According to DELL, we should able to see the official launch on 10Gbe on 1st quater of 2009.

Storage Planning – Virtualization

craig — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 05:35:47 +0000

Storage is always the important piece to be run in Data center as well as any solutions we put into the production environment. It will also impact the capacity planning, performance as well as the sustainable period of the specify solution.

Here I would like to specify talk about ESX storage planning. As many of the cases I read and experience before, more and more users are really heading to the stage of choosing specify storage for specify solutions. Example you may think off for using Netapps on NFS for ESX, which claim better performance, dedupe and protocol different. Somehow, the users had forgotten that they had not run any of netapps storage in their existing environment. When we look at the management perspective, the operation management for IT support is not SIMPLIFY. Everyone know how important to standardize our environment as well as simplify out IT environment. The more complex you have, the more pain you will feel.

ESX had been design to run on multiple different range, different brand, as well as different type of protocol of storage in the market today. The reason of this is able to provide users a number of choices to be choose for deployment which may really fit the existing environment. Most users are now been looking at the storage specifically for Virtualization, that was really due to the marketing strategy or brochure been always claim the specify products will gain better performance. If you are the storage guys in your IT department, maybe you should consider what will be the best fit for your environment VS what is the coolest technology in the world for VMware.

Let talk about 1 scenario here, a user who had existing running with cx3-80 EMC SAN storage with all fiber switches ready. The storage is only 50% populated. The storage guys had raised the request to bring in the latest ISCSI technology from netapps and Equal logic. When it does the price comparison, the TCO and implementation cost of ISCSI become too huge different VS extending the enclosure on cx3-80. Back to real world, I am really curious that if SAN Fiber storage will be poor perform and inconsistent compare to ISCSI if you have everything setup and configure correctly in your fiber SAN. Most of the case is NO. As in my POC test, I can see that the performances on the Fiber are still better and stable.

ISCSI is really simple and easier manage, but somehow, there are many technical details that require redeploying the entire environment to gain the peak performance you expected. That is definitely an advice at the end you will get from the vendor. Therefore, a best fit storage for your own environment is more important always. You should look at CAPEX vs OPEX when you plan the storage for virtualization.