Tegile Storage Array for VMware

vSphere
with Best Practices Recommendations
Last Update: 10/29/2013
Copyright 2013 Tegile Systems. All Rights Reserved.
Cont ent s
Contents
Contents........................................................................................................................................................ 3
The VMware vSphere Story .......................................................................................................................... 6
Adhere to vendor configuration best practices............................................................................................ 6
Tegile Best Practices ................................................................................................................................. 6
Build the environment expecting failure to occur...................................................................................... 10
Tegile Zebi Storage Array High Availability............................................................................................. 11
Active/active dual-redundant controllers........................................................................................... 11
End-to-end data integrity checks........................................................................................................ 11
RAID protection................................................................................................................................... 11
Space efficient snapshots.................................................................................................................... 11
Remote replication ............................................................................................................................. 11
Understand performance and failure points .............................................................................................. 11
Tegile Zebi Storage Array Monitoring..................................................................................................... 12
Lower costs and leverage VAAI and SIOC whenever possible.................................................................... 12
VAAI primitives........................................................................................................................................ 12
Block Zero............................................................................................................................................ 13
Full Copy.............................................................................................................................................. 13
Hardware Assisted Locking (also known as atomic test and set, or ATS)........................................... 13
Thin Provisioning Space Reclaim/Stun................................................................................................ 13
vSphere 5 VAAI enhancements............................................................................................................... 13
ATS-only volumes.................................................................................................................................... 14
Storage I/O Resource Allocation (SIOC):................................................................................................. 14
Tegile Integration with VMware............................................................................................................. 14
Use thin provisioning where possible, but keep watch.............................................................................. 14
Tegile Best Practices ............................................................................................................................... 15
Be mindful of alignment issues................................................................................................................... 15
Alignment vs. non-alignment.................................................................................................................. 15
Tegile Best Practices ............................................................................................................................... 16
Be Mindful of Snapshots............................................................................................................................. 17
Crash-Consistent snapshots.................................................................................................................... 17
Application-Consistent snapshots........................................................................................................... 17
Tegile Best Practices ............................................................................................................................... 18
Dont stress over transport choice.............................................................................................................. 18
Tegile Best Practices ............................................................................................................................... 18
Fibre Channel ...................................................................................................................................... 19
iSCSI..................................................................................................................................................... 19
NFS...................................................................................................................................................... 19
Summary..................................................................................................................................................... 20
The VMware vSphere St ory
VMware has managed to create what many organizations consider to be must have software and, in
the process, has led the charge in enabling customers to reinvent the data center around a virtual first
approach to workload execution. This new data center paradigm, coupled with VMwares leadership in
the paradigm shift, has given rise to an entire ecosystem of software and hardware providers dedicated
to helping organizations maximize the positive results that come from the solutions.
However, in order to truly maximize results, administrators must bear in mind a number of best
practices that pertain to the operation of such environments. These practices are more than just
vSphere configuration items; rather, the best practices discussed in this paper include, in addition to
specific configuration recommendations, design issues and overarching knowledge issues that, if
ignored, can result in less than optimal results.
Adhere t o vendor conf i gurat i on best pract i ces
Every storage array can be optimized. Only the array vendor has the complete spectrum of knowledge
as to how best to optimize the array to make sure that the array provides a customer with maximum
performance with minimal hassle. Perhaps the most important best practice of all, when it comes to
storage in a vSphere environment is to, whenever possible, adhere to the configuration best practices
outlined by the vendor.
TegileBest Practices
In this spirit, Tegile provides customers with comprehensive guidance as to what steps you need to take
for the best outcomes when using the array in a vSphere environment. As is the case with every array
vendor, Tegile provides a number of general and specific recommendations that are intended tohelp
customers get the most from their storage investment. These general guidelines are outlined below:
If possible, spread the I/O load across the two controllers in the Zebi storage array. This requires
configuring at least two storage pools, and distributing the pools across the two controllers.
Note that multiple pool configurations depend on the number of available SSDs.
Storage Pool configuration
o Ensure that you configure a minimum of 3 SSDs per storage pool:
2 SSDs for mirrored metadata
1 SSD for read/write secondary cache
o Configure a minimum of 1 hot spare HDD per pool.
o Use RAID 10 when configuring data drives for best performance.
LUN configuration for ESXi OS images using VMFS datastores
o Use 32KB for block size
o Configure thin provisioned LUNs.Enablededuplication(choose SHA 256for checksum)
o Enable compression(choose lzjbor lz4).Choose Virtualizatio for the Purpose
parameter
Fileshare configuration for ESXiOS images using NFS datastores
o Use 32KB for block size
o Enable deduplication(select SHA 256for checksum)
o Enable compression(select lzjbor lz4)
o Choose Virtualization for the Purpose parameter
o Ensure that Serversis set to 1024
o Ensure that Lockd Serversis set to 1024
Bui l d t he envi ronment expect i ng f ai l ure t o occur
No one wants failure to occur in their data center environment. Unfortunately, failures can and do
happen and data center architects need to bear this in mind. As the saying goes, Those that fail to plan,
plan to fail. With this in mind, when designing a storage environment to support a vSphere
implementation, there should be an expectation that failure will eventually occur at any point in the
environment, even when using the best equipment.
In order to fully accommodate such issues, administrators should choose to use hypervisor features such
as high availability or fault tolerance. These services inject into the environment software-driven
availability mechanisms. However, you must support them withadequate physical hardware in order to
be truly useful. For example, when configuring virtual switches on vSphere hosts, use multiple physical
network links to protect against failure of a link for any reason. This is also true for storage networking
connectivity in a vSphere environment. The storage network must be robust. Enable multiple data
pathways to provide maximum performance and tolerance for hardware failure.
In addition, consider features available in the storage environment for their ability to help organizations
plan for the worst while hoping for the best. While the hypervisor will certainly have a lot of features
that can help protect from failure, Tegile recommends leveraging all aspects of the environment.
TegileZebi Storage Array High Availability
Understanding that the unexpected will always occur, Tegile provides customers with a comprehensive
set of features intended to protect customers from eventual failure. These redundancy and availability
features are outlined in the sections below.
Active/active dual-redundant controllers
Tegiles storage arrays are highly reliable even with just a single controller, but with two controllers,
downtime is practically a thing of the past. While some vendors choose to implement controller
redundancy in an active/passive configuration, Tegile proves that you can obtain maximum performance
benefits through the simultaneous use of both controllers as often as possible. Besides providing
additional reliability, this configuration helps organizations scale to larger workloads.
End-to-end data integrity checks
End-to-end integrity is a feature of the core software in Tegiles Zebi line of storage arrays. This feature
ensures that data is always consistent by constantly comparing each read data block against an
independent checksum. By using an independent checksum rather than just comparing a block read
from disk and placed into RAM with the same block from disk, the integrity feature can protect
organizations from many different forms of data damage.
RAID protection
Tegiles storage arrays provide a set of rich RAID options including mirroring, single-parity, dual-parity
and triple-parity RAID protection.
Space efficient snapshots
Disasters do not always take the form of a fire, hurricane, or tornado. Sometimes, a disaster can be the
result of a simple wrong click of the mouse, which, for example, could result in an accidentally deleted
database or virtual machine. With Tegiles space efficient snapshots, recovery from such incidences is
swift.
Remote replication
Natural disasters can strike fast and without warning. When disaster strikes, it can destroy an entire
data center in the blink of an eye. With Tegiles built-in remote replication capability, customers can
add powerful additional data protection layer to existing data protection mechanisms by replicating
array data to a geographically disparate data center, ensuring that a natural disaster does not mean the
end of the business.
Underst and perf ormance and f ai l ure poi nt s
In any complex virtual environment, there are a myriad of points at which performance issues can be
introduced into the environment and negatively impact business workloads.At the same time,
understanding failure points can help administrators head off small problems before they become larger
ones.
Performance and failure issues can take place at the host, virtual machine, transport, array, or disk level
and at locations within each of those areas. For example, within the array itself, memory utilization may
run too high. Administrators must make every effort to ensure that there is visibility into as many
potential performance or failure points as possible, with such information being easily retrievable and
actionable.
Tegile Zebi Storage Array Monitoring
The Zebi storage arrays are easy to configure and monitor. The dashboard provides a birds-eye view into
the health and overall status of the system. It allows an administrator to see a summary of CPU activity,
memory utilization, space usage, network activity, disk activity, and the status of key services on the
system.
This dashboard allows an administrator too quickly:
View the overall space usage on the appliance to ensure there is enough capacity.
Monitor network and disk activity to ensure that the system is not nearing network throughput
limits or ensure that the disk activity is not uncommonly high, etc.
Monitor the basic processing and memory resources in the system to ensure that the system is
not unusually busy or pressed for processing/memory resources.
View the status of key services on the system (e.g. NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, FC, etc.) and enable/disable
them if needed.
For NFS datastores, the dashboarddisplays VM-level storage metrics, allowing virtualization
administrators to identify storage performance bottlenecks at an individual VM level of granularity. The
VM-level metrics are also available from VMware vCenter through the Tegile vCenter client plugin.
In addition to the birds-eye view of the system, Zebi also enables the administrator to monitor the
system in greater detail using the analytics dashboard and monitoring worksheets. You can perform this
additional monitoring at a protocol level (e.g. look at NFS traffic versus iSCSI traffic), or at deeper
granularity levels (e.g. view traffic per iSCSI target, etc.)
You can customize a monitoring worksheet by the administrator by simply choosing the widgets that
represent the areas of interest. This view is commonly used when an administrator wants to detect
potential bottlenecks in the system or to verify that all layers are functioning satisfactorily.
Additionally, the dashboard enables an administrator to understand how space is used over time making
it possible to estimate future capacity requirements based on current usage patterns.
Lower cost s and l everage VAAI and SI OC whenever possi bl e
vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) is a feature that was originally introduced in vSphere 4.1 and
significantly improved in vSphere 5.0. VAAI is a set of storage APIs provided by VMware, which
individual storage array vendors can integrate into their storage products to offload specific storage
related operations from host to storage toachieve other efficiencies.
VAAI primitives
VAAI consists of a number of primitives, which are API stubs to which vendors connect their code. In ESX
4.1, VAAI is available to block storage devices only, and only the first three primitives are supported
through vendor-specific plug-ins. The last primitive -- Thin Provisioning Space Reclaim -- is available in
vSphere 4.1, but it is undocumented and not well implemented in the storage ecosystem. It is fully
supported in vSphere 5.
Block Zero
The Block Zero primitive enables the array to zero-out large numbers of blocks very quickly and with a
single command. This is especially useful, for example, during the VM creation process. Without the
Block Zero VAAI primitive, an administrator must wait while the hypervisor itself individually zeroes out
storage during the creation of thick volumes. With the Block Zero VAAI primitive, the hypervisor can
simply provide the array with a single instruction to perform the zeroing process.
Full Copy
Full Copy enables the storage array to make full copies of virtual disks within the array rather than
having to copy the machine over the storage network to the hypervisor and then back to the storage
array. This is especially useful during virtual machine cloning operations and can significantly reduce the
performance impact of such operations on the storage fabric and the host.
But, that simple cloning operation, when performed in a traditional environment, is actually quite
complex and resource intensive. Heres a look at the process.
1. The vSphere host needs to contact the storage array and begin locating the contents that are to
be cloned.
2. On a block-by-block basis, that content is transferred over the storage communications network
to the vSphere host, where it undergoes some processing.
3. The vSphere host then writes each block back to the storage array.
Hardware Assisted Locking (also known as atomic test and set, or ATS)
ATS provides a more effective mechanism for handling SCSI reservations to protect VMFS metadata
during updates. In fact, in older editions of ESX/ESXi/vSphere, SCSI reservations were one of the issues
affecting both performance and the ability to easily scale VMFS volumes. The more virtual machine
VMDK files on a VMFS volume, the more likely that SCSI locking issues would affect other virtual
machines.
Thin Provisioning Space Reclaim/Stun
Allows the reclamation of unused space and protects the VM and application from out-of-space
condition on thin provisioned volumes.
vSphere 5 VAAI enhancements
There are a fewenhancements to VAAI that came with ESX 5.0. First, VAAI is available for NFS storage,
and they added a thin provisioning primitive. Also, VMware standardized all four primitives as T10
standard SCSI commands, which brings VAAI in line with industry standards. No new VAAI primitives
were added in vSphere 5.1 or vSphere 5.5, but VMware improved existing VAAI primitives for efficiency
and simplicity.
ATS-only volumes
Try to use ATS-only volumes whenever possible, but be careful! ATS volumes are not supported by
every version of vSphere, so there may be a period of time during which interoperability between
volumes becomes problematic as organizations shift to ATS volumes.
Storage I/O Resource Allocation (SIOC):
SIOC enables I/O prioritization for specific VMs in an environment where multiple VMs across multiple
ESXi hosts access a shared storage pool. ESXi provides dynamic storage resource allocation mechanisms
which allow critical workloads to maintain performance even during peak load periods where there is a
contention for I/O resources.
Tegile Integration with VMware
Tegile Zebi storage arrays are tightly integrated with VMware, enabling customers to take advantage of
the VMware storage-centric features, including VAAI and SIOC.
Use t hi n provi si oni ng where possi bl e, but keep wat ch
Thin provisioning provides customers with a method to expand the return on their storage investment
by gaining the ability to allocate more logical disk space to virtual machines than is actually available on
the physical array.
At first, it may seem like a foolishidea to enable such capability, but once placed into the context of the
larger data center, thin provisioning makes more sense. That said, use of thin provisioning does demand
that organizations maintain careful watch over actual capacity use to make sure that sufficient physical
capacity remains available to meet workload demands.
So, what are some of the reasons that thin provisioning may make sense for an organization? In looking
back at how servers used to be provisioned and comparing that with how virtual machines are
provisioned, not a lot has changed. Administrators still allocate far more disk space than is really
needed, leading to potentially wasted storage space.
Thin provisioning can makean array seem bigger than it actually is.As administrators overallocate
storage to individual virtual machines, thin provisioning only suppliesthe actual physical space needed
by a virtual machine. The remaining space is kept in the pool of allocable storage. So, if someone
provisions a 100 GB virtual disk, but only uses 20 GB, that other 80 GB can be used by other virtual
machines.
Thin provisioning allows an organization to take a template-based approach to virtual machine
provisioning, even if the capacity assignments in those templates arent that efficient. With thin
provisioning, administrators dont risk wasting valuable storage resources. This results in improved
return on investment figures for the storage array.
There is often confusion as to on which device thin provisioning should occur. You can create thin
provisioned disks on vSphere at the time you create a virtual disk, but most modern enterprise-class
storage arrays also provide thin provisioning services. So, administrators are left with a decision as to
where best to enable the service. For the best possible use of disk space, many advocate for a thin-on-
thin configuration wherein an administrator creates thin provisioned virtual disks and stores them on
thin provisioned LUNs on a storage array. In other words, thin provisioning is ena
hypervisor layer as well as at the storage layer.
them on thin provisioned arrays, which carries most of the same benefits.
The bottom line is this: thin provisio
ensure that physical capacity remains sufficient to meet the needs of the virtual machines.
monitoring and alerting tools to ensure that an array doesnt run out of space.
Particularly astute readers may wonder what happens if the array actually runs out of physical space.
After all, with thin provisioning, its entirely possible to allocate more storage to virtual machines than is
physically available on the array. If an ar
additional space, VAAIs STUN primitive
machine to prevent catastrophic data loss.
Without VAAI support, a virtual machine
wouldfail. This could be particularly bad for databases, which would
rebuild/repair process.
Tegile Best Practices
Configure thin provisioned LUNs from the Zebi storage array and use
LUNs on ESXi. Since Zebi storage arrays are VAAI
host to the Zebi storage array, increasing the performance of the eager zero operation.
Be mi ndf ul of al i gnment i ssues
Although less of an issue than it was in the past, misaligned stor
This happens when the hypervisor, physical I/O block offset
cases, unnecessary physical I/O takes place at the storage side, negatively impacting the entire
environment. In a virtual environment, misalignment if often magnified due to the hypervisor virtual
disk abstraction taking place between the guest operating system and the storage device.
Alignment vs. non-alignment
layer, hence impacting
performance.
Misaligned guest and
major cause of degraded
performance. For VMFS
that the guest virtual and
partitions are properly aligned to the storage array LUNs. Misalignment is mainly a concern with
thin provisioned LUNs on a storage array. In other words, thin provisioning is enabled at both the
hypervisor layer as well as at the storage layer. Other adminscreate thick virtual hard disks and store
them on thin provisioned arrays, which carries most of the same benefits.
oning make sense, but requires constant administrator attention to
ensure that physical capacity remains sufficient to meet the needs of the virtual machines.
to ensure that an array doesnt run out of space.
rticularly astute readers may wonder what happens if the array actually runs out of physical space.
After all, with thin provisioning, its entirely possible to allocate more storage to virtual machines than is
physically available on the array. If an array runs out of capacity when a virtual machine requests
additional space, VAAIs STUN primitive fully supported by Tegile safely pauses the affected virtual
machine to prevent catastrophic data loss.
Without VAAI support, a virtual machine would simply crash with a write error, or the application inside
fail. This could be particularly bad for databases, which would then generally require a
Configure thin provisioned LUNs from the Zebi storage array and use eager zeroprovisioning for these
LUNs on ESXi. Since Zebi storage arrays are VAAI-capable, it offloads eager zero operations
increasing the performance of the eager zero operation.
Be mi ndf ul of al i gnment i ssues
it was in the past, misaligned storage can create performance problems
ypervisor, physical I/O block offset and allocation size are out of sync
cases, unnecessary physical I/O takes place at the storage side, negatively impacting the entire
environment. In a virtual environment, misalignment if often magnified due to the hypervisor virtual
ion taking place between the guest operating system and the storage device.
alignment
When the host I/O requests, Logical Block Address (
I/O size, are rounded to the boundary of storage block size, it is
called aligned, and it results in optimal I/O performance. When
the I/O starting LBA or the I/O size are not rounded to the
boundary of storage block size, it is called misaligned, and it
results in unnecessary I/O at the storage layer or hype
the overall system
VMFS partitions are a
virtual machine
datastores,
vSphere
ns are properly aligned to the storage array LUNs. Misalignment is mainly a concern with
bled at both the
create thick virtual hard disks and store
sense, but requires constant administrator attention to
ensure that physical capacity remains sufficient to meet the needs of the virtual machines. Deploy
rticularly astute readers may wonder what happens if the array actually runs out of physical space.
After all, with thin provisioning, its entirely possible to allocate more storage to virtual machines than is
ray runs out of capacity when a virtual machine requests
safely pauses the affected virtual
simply crash with a write error, or the application inside
generally require a
provisioning for these
eager zero operations from the ESXi
increasing the performance of the eager zero operation.
age can create performance problems.
are out of sync. In such
cases, unnecessary physical I/O takes place at the storage side, negatively impacting the entire
environment. In a virtual environment, misalignment if often magnified due to the hypervisor virtual
ion taking place between the guest operating system and the storage device.
Logical Block Address (LBA) and
, are rounded to the boundary of storage block size, it is
O performance. When
O size are not rounded to the
boundary of storage block size, it is called misaligned, and it
storage layer or hypervisor
the overall system
VMFS partitions are a
virtual machine
datastores, ensure
vSphere VMFS
ns are properly aligned to the storage array LUNs. Misalignment is mainly a concern with
Windows XP and Windows 2003 guest VMs.Its
these operating system include additional intelligence to avoid this issue
Tegile Best Practices
Tegile Zebi storage array supports user
Therefore, you can fine-tune a Zebi
running on the same Zebi array.
The supported block sizes are: 4KB, 8KB, 16KB, 32KB, 64KB, and 128KB. Zebi
configuration based on the storage usage
By selecting the suitable application type, Zebi
as the best practice for the application. The
cases. Furthermore, users can fine-
Below are the general best practices
array, based on the usage purpose:
Use case 4K
Virtualization
Exchange DB
Exchange Log
SQL Server
Other DB
File Sharing
Backup
*Note: When deduplication is enabled on the LUN or Share,
32KB or more.
s XP and Windows 2003 guest VMs.Its not an issue for Windows 2008 and Windows 2012 as
these operating system include additional intelligence to avoid this issue.
supports user-configurable block size at per LUN or per NAS
Zebi to achieve optimal performance for multiple different applications
The supported block sizes are: 4KB, 8KB, 16KB, 32KB, 64KB, and 128KB. Zebi offers some
configuration based on the storage usage purpose: Virtualization, Database, File Sharing and Backup
By selecting the suitable application type, Zebi automatically selects the LUN block size that
or the application. The default block size configuration suffices for
-tune the block size to best suit their application environment.
are the general best practices for configuring the block size for both LUN and
on the usage purpose:
8K 16K 32K 64K

nabled on the LUN or Share, Tegile recommends that you

r Windows 2008 and Windows 2012 as
configurable block size at per LUN or per NAS share level.
to achieve optimal performance for multiple different applications
some a default LUN
purpose: Virtualization, Database, File Sharing and Backup:
the LUN block size that is validated
ices for most of the
their application environment.
the block size for both LUN and share on a Zebi
128K

recommends that you use block size

Be Mi ndf ul of Snapshot s
One of the most useful features of virtualization is the ability to snapshot a virtual machine. That point-
in-time picture of the virtual machines memory and virtual disk are useful should an app or OS upgrade
get corruptedwhentesting configuration changes. Virtualization backup and replication applications also
use the snapshot to capture virtual disk changes without causing downtime. However, many people
make the mistake of overusing snapshots , not only taking up disk space, but causing poor performance
for backup applications, vMotions, and other storage-related functions. Only use hypervisor-based
snapshots temporarily, and then delete them.
It is also important to understand snapshots in general.
Crash-Consistent snapshots
Crash-consistent snapshots enable live backup and guarantee the data stored is consistent for the
pointin-time when created. However, when it comes to attempting to perform a full recovery, this kind
of snapshot is not sufficient, as the application and the file system may not be aware of the snapshot or
a current backup. The snapshot doesnot capture the additional writes from the incomplete transaction,
or the cache data in the file system or application. When recovering data from such crash-consistent
snapshots, the file system and the application would have to go through a crash recovery process. This
does not guarantee the application can recover.
Application-Consistent snapshots
Application-consistent (also called transactional-consistent) snapshots ensure that the snapshot is
application-aware. Before Zebi takes a snapshot, it coordinates with the applications and the file
systems to quiesce the application and to flush the transactional and cached data onto storage. Then
the application resumes after it takes the snapshot. When restored from an application-consistent
snapshot, the applications can recover more accurately and consistently. The snapshots are application
and hypervisor-aware, and enable consistent application and virtual machine recovery.
In a Tegile environment, application consistency is accomplished through the use of Tegile Data
Protection Services (TDPS) software installed on a Windows guest VM.It works with the VSS service on
Windows, and communicates with the Zebi array to coordinate the creation of application and
hypervisor consistent snapshots. TDPS consists of two sub components:
Tegile Data Protection Agent (TDPA)
Tegile VSS HardwareProvider
Tegile Best Practices
Tegiles storage arrays support VM-consistent snapshots for virtual machines using VMDK files
VMwares virtual disk file format in a VMware ESXi environment, through VMTools. To work in a
seamless manner, Zebi communicates with the VMware host or VMware vCenter through the
management port. As such, users need to make sure that they connect theESXi hosts, vCenter, and the
Zebi storage array to the same management network. To ensure VM-consistent data protection, install
VMTools, and configure the VMware Snapshot Provider and Volume Shadow Copy services to
automatically start on all Windows VMs.
Tegile storage arrays also support application-consistent snapshots in the case of Windows guest VMs
with direct LUN access through a physical Raw Device Mapping (RDM) or VMDirectPath I/O to Zebi
storage arrays. This is accomplished through Tegile Data Protection Services (TDPS) software installed
on the Windows guest VMs.
For application-consistent snapshots, also verify the following items:
There are no dynamic disks or IDE disks in use
There are plenty of empty SCSI slots available in the virtual machine
The vSphere version is 4.1 or higher
Don t st ress over t ransport choi ce
Fiber Channel, iSCSI, NFS there are certainly pros and cons to each, but dont worry too much about
making the perfect selection. In the real world, froma performance perspective, it is really hard to
saturate the storage transport. Sure, the biggest organizations out there will certainly push even the
fastest Fiber Channel to its limits, but the vast majority of businesses are just fine with any of the
options. As such, make a transport choice based on other factors, such as ease of implementation or
ability to get detailed performancemetrics.
Tegile Best Practices
Tegiles storage arrays are unique in the hybrid storage space in that they provide the full range of
connectivity options for customers, so they can meet any use case. For each transport choice, Tegile has
a set of specific recommendations that administrators should follow for best results. These best
practices are outlined in the sections below.
Fibre Channel
Balance active I/O across all available FC paths for the LUNs.
Configure all the Zebi target FC ports into a single FC target group.
Set the maximum number of outstanding disk requests from the ESXi host by setting the
Di sk. SchedNumReqOut st andi ngparameter in ESXi to 32, 64 or 128 based on the
formulato prevent flooding the target port queue depth. The command queue depth for each FC
port on the Zebi storage array is set to 2048. The formula is:
o (Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding) * (number of LUNs) * (number of ESXi hosts in the
cluster) <= 2048 * (number of FC ports in the Zebi storage array)
iSCSI
If possible, configure jumbo frames. Ensure that all devices along the I/O path are configured for
jumbo frames.
On each controller, configure all Ethernet interfaces used for iSCSI into a single IPMP group.
Use separate subnets for NFS and management networks.
If possible, add multiple floating IP addresses on the iSCSI IPMP group to balance the load across
the interfaces. The number of floating IP addresses should match the number of interfaces in
the IPMP group.
Use software iSCSI initiators instead of hardware iSCSI adapters to ensure that there are no
compatibility issues.
Set the maximum number of outstanding disk requests from the ESXi host by setting the
Di sk. SchedNumReqOut st andi ngparameter in ESXi to 32, 64 or 128 based on the
formulato prevent flooding the target port queue depth. The command queue depth for each
iSCSI port on the Zebi storage array is set to 2048. The formula is:
o (Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding) * (number of LUNs) * (number of ESXi hosts in the
cluster) <= 2048 * (number of FC ports in the Zebi storage array)
NFS
Configure all Ethernet interfaces on each controller used for NFSinto a single IPMP group.
Use separate subnets for NFS and management networks.
Add multiple floating IP addresses on the NFS IPMP group to balance the load across the
interfaces, if possible. The number of floating IP addresses should match the number of
interfaces in the IPMP group.
On the ESXi hosts, distribute the access to NFS shares evenly across the floating IP addresses.
Configure the ESXiNFS. MaxQueueDept h parameter to 32, 64 or 128 to avoidcongestion on
the storage arrays By default, the value of NFS. MaxQueueDept hin ESXi 5.x hosts is set to a
very high value (4294967295).. Use the formula:
o (NFS.MaxQueueDepth) * (number of Shares) * (number of ESXi hosts) <= 1024
Summary
Tegile Zebi storage arrays are built from the ground up with virtualization in mind, to address the unique
IOPS requirements of virtualized workloads. Zebi storage arrays are also tightly integrated with VMware
for better performance, availability and management of VMware environments. The best practices
listed above enable customers to take advantage of the Zebi feature set and the integration with
VMware for the best functionality and most optimized results.