Went through a session of sharing this morning from the federal goverment about the development and testing as a servic cloud computing in real deployment for experience sharing. The session was interesting with details architecture sharing how it was deployed by the presenter.
One of the key area they highlighted was the stoage protocol they choosed, which is NFS rather than iscsi and FC SAN, which was mainly due to the flexibility of volume shrink or resize that could support on the fly. I am agreed with their statement as personal thought, for large scale deployment, NFS are much easier to manage compare to Iscsi and FC environment.
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Yesterday I re-setup the VMware environment for my client. There was a weird problem we were facing on the port group from standard vswitch for VMkernel. Here is the step how I create it.
Firstly, I created a new vSwitch, which is vSwitch 1 is this case, and I created 2 extra port group which is NFS1 and NFS2 at the same time with correct ip, subnet and etc. Once I done that, I click ok to apply the configuration. Funny thing happen now, the NFS1 created was working as I can mount the datastore as I need. NFS2 was giving problem which it suppose to point to different storage unit for NFS, it could not reach the storage unit. I try to perform vmkping on the ESX host, and it could not reach the storage host.
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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.
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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.
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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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