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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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.
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VMware ESX host need to have storage available before create VMs. Normally the storage is a LUN created on SAN. The question is, what is the best size for a single LUN (storage) in ESX?
Our design for a storage on ESX is 300GB, allow maximum VMFS up to 256GB.
The reasons behind are:
- better I/O performance: Each storage in ESX, we only assign to 5 VMs or less. Since more running VMs on a single storage will hit into the LUN I/O speed bottle neck.
- better disk utilization: You can safe lots of unuse space when you do it small. Say You assign a 2TB storage that can keep 40 VMs, but you only have 20 now, you actually waste 1TB which is sitting there doing nothing. But if you make each storage small, you can create only when you need it. It is much more manageable on SAN disk allocation point of view.
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The following article will share how to add new hard disk into SuSE Linux Enterprise Server without reboot.
Follow these steps:
- Create a new LUN and assign to the ESX Server Storage Group on SAN.
- Rescan Storage Adaptors on ESX Server Virtual Infrastructure Console.
- Add new Hard Disk into VM by Edit Setting.
- Open VM Console(SSH will work as well).
- Detect new disk command # rescan-scsi-bus.sh
- Find new disk command # cat /proc/partitions
- Create new partition on the disk command # fdisk /dev/sdx
- Format new disk partition # mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdx1
- Edit /etc/fstab to add in permanent mount point for new disk and partition.
- Mount new disk # mount -a
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Recently there had been strong grow and push for the 2nd tier ISCSI storages from the SAN Storage company like Netapps, EMC, DELL, HP, IBM and etc. A lot of the white paper and marketing brochure had been publish and been communicated to the public in worldwide, which claim the VM is out perform with the ISCSI VS Fiber Channel SAN.
I would like to share couple of my finding in the real Prove of concept and test that myself had personally setup and experience here. VMware do support hardware base ISCSI HBA and software base ISCSI through its VMkernel. Couple of thing that you may want to consider before we really decide to proceed further with the ISCSI. Networking become more and more important since the last decade to be operate most of the important pieces in the Production Data Center. Networking had also become the major issue for most of the time especially in VM environment which may need a bigger bandwidth to support the multiple VMs that been consolidated to single Physical Host.
I had been invited by the Equal Logic vendor to run the real test with the demo in my datacenter. Below is the major finding I would want to share
Test Equipment
Server - DELL PE 2950 8GB and 2 x Quad Core 2.0 Ghz
Storage Switches - DELL Gigabit Switches
Storages - Equal Logic PS 5000 with SAS HDD
Operatin System - SUSE Linux, Windows 2003, ESX 3.5
Impressive
- High Processing speed due to the processor build in for each storage bay. It can be scale up to 12 storage bay in the cluster basis. Each enclosure contains 16 physical spindle drives with SAS technology
- Simplify management - the entire process to configure the storage to be useable is less than 15 Mins. Its all web base and able to run on the open source browser such as firefox
- Maximize through put through the software ISCSI initiator been tested on servers and my personal laptop. It able to suck up 97% of the gigabit through put from my laptop gigabit connection and the server gigabit connection as well.
- High redundancy with global hotspare configuration recommended
- Impressive load balance feature which able to scale from storage and perfomance perspective. Additional enclosure will provide additional spindle power and processing power from the stroage bay. Compare to Clariion series currently, which always provide slow perfomance when the storage are only 60% populated.
- Shorter commissioning process and reduce provisioning time line. almost plug and play
- RAID 50 available as an option to be configure during the provision process
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