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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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.
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Recently I had read a couple of article regarding the performance caparison chart from VMware, Netapps and some of the forum communities, I do really find out the real performance is much different with the technical white paper that I read before this.
As for the today, more users are actually deployed the mission critical and high I/O servers on the virtualization environment, but we do see some I/O bottle neck which cause by the storage performance always. VMDK do provide flexibility from management perspective, but it does sacrifice the performance you may require for your databases, files transfers and disk performance. I had run a couple of test with real case scenerio instead of I/O meter that been always use widely, and here is the summarize result I would like to share.
In disk perfomance, we always split it to 2 categories as sequential and random I/O. in sequential mode, you will see the huge different while you try to perform the file transfer locally or through network. My test environment is running with SAN storage from fiber channel with same LUN size and raid group which are created from the Storage Level. The only differences is VMFS Vs Raw.
Raid Group design 7+1 raid 5 configuration and run on MetaLun configuration
Each LUN size is 300GB
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