Recently I had deployed quite a number of EMC SAN with MDS Switches and Cisco UCS, I found tha FC SAN zoning might be a key consideration we may need to take a look for every deployment. This post will more focus on the MDS and UCS 6120 FC Uplink.
Cisco UCS interconnect fabric switches are utilizing FC uplink to allow the Cisco Unified Computing System to get access to the SAN fabric environment.
Here is the architecture diagram you can refer to. In order to make this work, 1st requirement will be the NPIV.
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There are always challenges to match the Raw Device Mapping in VMware to the actual physical LUN from SAN storage. For current ESX 3.5 U3, what we had done to manage our RDM is all depend on the LUN name which presented at the management console from our EMC storage, and the LUN ID which publish at the vCenter management interface. In vCenter, there are numbers of LUNs presented to each ESX server which will be provided a unique LUN ID for each of the LUN. These LUN IDs should able to be match with the Host ID from the EMC navisphere web management GUI interface. At the same time, we had renamed the LUN to match with the virtual machine or ESX hosts which connecting to the LUNs for tracking and management purpose. These allow us to keep track every LUN been assigned to our Virtual Infrastructure.
In vSphere, the next version of ESX server, VMware had included the new features, which provide capability to rename the device’s name for each of the LUN been presented to the ESX hosts. This will provide alternative to keep track the physical LUNs which presented to ESX hosts and VMs too.
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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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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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