Top 5 vSphere Storage Design Questions

Discusses five commonly-asked questions about designing storage solutions for VMware vSphere

Transcript

1. Before we start • Get involved! • If you use Twitter, feel free to tweet about this session (use hashtag #ATLVMUG) • I encourage you to take photos or videos of today’s session and share them online • This presentation will be made available online after the event
2. Top 5 vSphere Storage Design Questions Five questions that get asked when creating a storage design for VMware vSphere Scott Lowe, VCDX 39 vExpert, Author, Blogger, Geek http://blog.scottlowe.org / Twitter: @scott_lowe
3. • Should I use block or NAS for my datastores? • Should I use multiple extents, or stick to a single extent? • Should I thin provision at the array or at the hypervisor? • Should I use one big datastore, or multiple smaller datastores? • Should I use SIOC and/or SDRS? Top 5 vSphere storage design questions
4. • It shouldn’t be an “or” discussion, rather an “and” discussion • Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses • Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses against the functional requirements of the design Block or NAS
5. Block or NAS Storage type Block (FC, FCoE, iSCSI) NAS (NFS) Easier management No Yes Robust multipathing support Yes No (better in vSphere 5) Very low latency Yes (typically) No (not typically) Performance Good Good
6. • Try to stick to a single extent where possible • Multiple extents aren’t as necessary anymore • VMFS-5 volumes can be up to 64TB • You can dynamically grow a VMFS volume • Leverage multiple extents if you need to implement wide- striping at the hypervisor level • SIOC requires single-extent datastores Multiple extents vs. single extent
7. • Thin provisioning at the array level is generally recommended • Make sure you are monitoring space utilization! • vSphere 5 adds more thin provisioning awareness and better support for out of space (OOS) conditions Thin provisioning
8. Thin provisioning awareness in esxcli
9. • VAAI makes SCSI reservation conflicts a thing of the past; don’t size based on the past! • Size datastores based on I/O profile, not the number of VMs • You'll also want to consider other requirements (backup/ restore or replication, for example) Datastore sizing
10. • Should I use them? The short answer: Yes • There is really no downside to enabling SIOC • Also no real downside to enabling SDRS for capacity management • For auto-tiering arrays, don’t enable I/O metrics SIOC and SDRS
11. Questions & Answers
12. Thank You