VMware Storage (SAN/iSCSI/NFS)

SAN Configuration Guide

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_esx_san_cfg.pdf

A big guide from VMware on SAN background, installation and management

 

SAN System Design and Deployment Guide

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_design_deploy.pdf

Another big guide from VMware on designing and deploying SAN environments to use with VI3

 

Design, Build and Manage your SAN Environment using VI3

http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/mylearn?classID=11052

A VMworld 2007 presentation from VMware that discusses how VMware Infrastructure 3 can solve SAN management problems by providing solutions such as managing multiple hosts/clients from sprawling, multipathing management without the high cost and complexity, cluster file system for HA solutions, LUN security, and storage consolidation. This is a vendor neutral session providing topics for SAN architects and administrators ideas on ways to best deploy VMware Infrastructure 3 on SAN.

 

NFS & iSCSI – Performance Characterization and Best Practices

http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/mylearn?classID=11708

A VMworld 2007 presentation from VMware that provides a performance-oriented overview of the technology along with performance troubleshooting techniques and best-practice recommendations in typical ESX Server deployment. Up-to-date performance data, a review of performance optimizations available currently and a preview of features in upcoming releases are also be presented.

 

Choosing and Architecting Storage for your Environment

http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/adc0135.pdf

A VMworld 2006 presentation on selecting and architecting the right storage solution for your ESX environment

 

ESX Storage Virtualization Insights

http://www.vmware-tsx.com/download.php?asset_id=40

A TSX 2007 presentation on the ESX storage stack, VMFS vs. RDM and multi-pathing

 

Network Appliance and VMware ESX Server 3.0 Storage Best Practices

http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3428.pdf

A white paper from Netapp with general best practices and recommendations on using storage with ESX

 

iSCSI, NAS and IP Storage Configuration for Vmware ESX Server

http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9722.pdf

A VMworld 2006 presentation on using iSCSI and NAS instead of a SAN with ESX

 

Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/storage_protocol_perf.pdf

A VMware performance study comparing Fibre Channel, Hardware iSCSI, Software iSCSI and NFS

 

Configuring iSCSI in a Vmware 3 environment

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_iscsi_cfg.pdf

A white paper from VMware on using and configuring iSCSI in your ESX environment

Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 – Upgrade Guide

Citrix Logo

White Paper from the citrix website on upgrading to CTX 4.0

citrixpresentationservertechnicalupgradewhitepaper

Dispelling myths about clustering NAS and file servers

worth a read ……….

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid5_gci1307947,00.html

 

Myth: More ports, processors, nodes, networks and devices guarantee more performance.

It’s not just about the number of components or speeds and feeds. More nodes, ports, memory and disks do not guarantee more performance for applications.; It depends on how those resources are deployed and how the storage management software enables those resources to avoid bottlenecks. For some clustered NAS and storage systems, more nodes are required to compensate for overhead or performance congestion owhen f processing diverse application workload and performance characteristics

NAS

While clustered storage is often associated with high performance computing, the reality is that organization are adopting adopting clustered storage at a rapid rate.

 These organizations are attracted by the way clustered storage uses technologies

• Ethernet,
• Fibre Channel
• InfiniBand protocols,

by its reliance on open access methods such as NFS and Windows CIFS, and by its use of industry-standard servers and third-party storage.

The clustered storage solutions that are growing in popularity are network attached storage (NAS) file servers. Deployments of this technology are being driven by the need of organizations to scale beyond the limits of a single storage box to handle structured and unstructured data.

Clustered NAS systems offer scaling advantages on many levels:

• scaling in performance of large sequential bandwidth (throughput) or small random IOPS (transactional) and meta data lookup;
• scaling in storage capacity;
• scaling availability on a local or distributed basis to isolate against device or site failure;
• scaling of flexibility, including concurrent access of the same or different data along with parallel access of data for different application needs;
• scaling in terms of offering modular (pay-as-you-grow) storage growth; and
• scaling in ease of manageability of tasks such as provisioning of storage, load balancing and data protection.

Approaches to NAS and file serving clustering

The technologies that most companies are clustering are storage, file systems and file servers.

Clustering adds standby or failover capabilities to storage systems that in turn support scaling with a large number of controllers, storage nodes or processors along with clustered file systems.

One reason for the confusion in discussions of clustered storage is that there are block-based (iSCSI and Fibre Channel) and file-based (NAS NFS and CIFS) storage, virtual tape libraries and other types of clustered storage solutions.

Clustered file systems enable administrators to access a common pool of storage across application servers. Clustered file systems also permit shared access (read and write) of data files, which is useful for maintaining data consistency and integrity whether using direct-attached or networked storage.

What differentiates a clustered fileserver from a traditional NAS file server or clustered storage system is the way hardware and software is combined.

A clustered file system can be installed on application servers or on dedicated appliances or servers, transforming them into storage servers (essentially, becoming a clustered fileserver).

Some vendors who have dual or redundant storage controllers, storage engines, NAS heads or gateways using active/active (both controllers working) or active/passive (one controller in standby) modes claim to offer clustered storage systems.

A pair of storage processors or controllers as a cluster, you’d have to consider every storage system with at least two nodes a cluster. . .which would encompass pretty much all of the mid-range SAN, DAS and NAS storage systems in the marketplace.

NAS, by its nature, is a file serving solution that sits on top of hardware and in some cases has the ability to transform the hardware into a clustered fileserver

Reset an HP ILO Password

To reset an HP ILO’s password  follow the link http://www.bladewatch.com/2008/06/10/reset-hp-ilo-password/  on Blade Watch. 

This is a method that can be used locally or against a remote server using the HP utility, ‘hponcfg’. 

The utility can also be called from a server build script so as to assist in an automated server build

Shutting down the VSAs – Cleanly

Power off the VSA via the Central Management Console (CMC).

Highlight the management group select shutdown group

Select to shutdown all nodes

This will shutdown the VSA cleanly,

Low cost fully featured shared storage solution

The VSA  Virtual Storage Appliance from LeftHandNetworks for VMware ESX creates VMFS storage using the unused white space on the local ESX host. By virtualizing the internal disk capacity of the VMware ESX host server and clustering the storage across different ESX hosts, the VSA will give me all the features of an expensive SAN but without the cost

 

The evaluation download is a 30-day, fully functional evaluation edition for VMware ESX capable of supporting up to 2TB per node. Each VSA requires 1GB of RAM and at least 5GB of disk space.

 

Differences between the licensed and unlicensed version

 

All SAN/iQ® features can be used for a trial period of 30 days.

 

After 30 days, volumes will be disconnected if any licensed features are in use. 

 

Licensed features include:

• • Clustering
• • Snapshots
• • Remote Copy
• • Multi-Site SANs
  

The VSA can be used for free indefinitely as a single node iSCSI target without snapshots or remote copy however If a configuration (management group) is deleted and recreated the 30 days trial period of licensed features starts again

 

With my lab i will be looking at

 

• Creating storage clusters
• Creating and thin provision volumes
• Replicate of data data (between clusters)
• Test server virtualization HA features with integrated storage failover/failback

 The appliance can be downloaded at

 

 http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/vsa_eval.aspx

Remote Replication Capabilities

Not all SANs are created equal when comparing remote replication capability. It’s amazing to see all the storage vendors marketing their capabilities as if they were technology leaders, when in fact most of their offerings are feature deficient or very (sorry extremely) expensive to deploy.

 

I’ve talked with a few customers that require offsite replication for DR/business continuity. Here is their consolidated “critical requirements” wish list.

 

Asynchronous Local and Remote Replication:

 

1. Scheduled SAN based asynchronous replication over any distance using standard IP networking gear, meaning no Fibre channel to IP bridge equipment.
2. Must work over almost any link bandwidth (T1 being the most common).
3. Technology should minimize the replicated data rate by sending only block level changes.
4. Must have some bandwidth management tools to slice up link bandwidth and share it with other applications that use the remote link.
5. Must provide the capability of failing over servers to the remote site, failing back and incrementally resynchronizing the primary site with the changes.
6. Should provide the tools necessary to replicate application-consistent data sets, making application recovery a simple matter of mounting a set of consistent volumes.

Synchronous Local and Remote Replication:

 

1. SAN based synchronous replication using standard IP networking gear, meaning no Fibre Channel to IP bridge equipment.
2. Should provide seamless application server failover and failback to the remote site and back with no manual intervention and with incremental data re-synchronization.
3. If a site fails, volumes must automatically remain online at the remaining site.
4. Must work seamlessly with server and application failover software.
5. Must work seamlessly with server virtualization HA products.
6. Capable of utilizing the bandwidth to of fat pipes (parallelism).
7. Must protect against “split brains” (insures data integrity at both sites when the link between sites is down and transactions are still being processed).
8. Capability to bring a site down for maintenance without downtime.
9. Must support applications running on more than one site and replicating to each other.
10. Geographic/site awareness with I/O preferencing based on site/subnet.

When you start going down the list of SAN storage vendors, checking off those that do not meet these basic critical requirements, your options start dropping off rapidly. When you add a requirement to keep costs down, the list thins out even more. Most of the mid-range vendors only support SAN based replication using Fibre Channel, which means expensive Fibre Channel to IP bridge equipment is required on both ends of the pipe along with training and professional services to install, not to mention the outrageous software licensing costs.

Solaris 10 for X86

I’ve already downloaded the x86 version of it, and will attempt to install this Solaris 10 release on my home VMware Server.

Here are a few links you might find useful:

- What’s new in Solaris 10 http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547/gghpo?a=view

- Solaris 10u5 download page http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp#download

HP StorageWorks 4×00/6×00/8×00 Enterprise Virtual Array configuration best practices white paper

 

HP Eva 4000

 This document PDF document is really useful – Eva best practices white paper.