If you’re an engineer and you’re trying to get more experience with a variety of different storage devices, you might find yourself in a bit of a pickle. Most customers settle one one or two storage vendors and that’s it. So if you work for one of these companies you can learn EMC or Netapp, etc. I highly doubt your company would be interested in purchases a few different types of storage devices so that you can learn them as they are quite expensive. ...
One of the companies I worked for got a Netapp filer and I loved the fact that it would dedupe the data that was sitting on disk. I got over 40% more storage just by having that sweet little feature on. I was thinking, “How awesome would it be to dedupe my memory?” Getting more memory out of my servers would be a nice thing. Well as it turns out, VMware does this already, but they call it “Transparent Page Sharing.” ...
I was recently helping out a company attempt to upgrade their Netapp Filer from OnTap 7.3 over to Data OnTap 8. We ran the Netapp Upgrade advisor and got to a section that wanted us to run the AggrSpaceCheck tool to make sure that the aggregates had sufficient space available. Normally, I skip this step because I usually have plenty of space available, but in this particular case, some of the aggregates were already 99% full. Since we didn’t want to have a serious failure during our upgrade we decided to error on the side of caution (and best practices) and run the AggrSpaceCheck tool. ...
Netapp has released their vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) provider 1.0 to their support site. http://support.netapp.com If you’re not that familiar with the VASA concept, this article should explain what it is and how it’s used in regards to VMware vSphere 5. What is VASA? VASA Providers collect information about your storage systems and present that information to vSphere. In previous versions of vSphere, an administrator might need to keep track of hisher datastores in a spreadsheet or have a naming convention that showed the properties of an individual datastore. For example, if your storage system had both SSD and Sata disks, the Datastore might be named VMFS01_SSD or something similar. ...
One of my most frequently read articles is on how to use MBRAlign to align your virtual machine disks on Netapp storage. Well, after Netapp has released their new Virtual Storage Console (VSC4) the tedious task of using MBRAlign might be eased for some admins. Optimization and Migration The new VSC4 console for vSphere has a new tab called Optimization and Migration. Here you are able to scan all or some of your datastores to check the alignment of your virtual machines. The scan manager can even be set on a schedule so that changes to the datastore will be recognized. ...
Determining which type of RAID to use when building a storage solution will largely depend on two things; capacity and performance. Performance is the topic of this post. We measure disk performance in IOPS or Input/Output per second. One read request or one write request = 1 IO. Each disk in you storage system can provide a certain amount of IO based off of the rotational speed, average latency and average seek time. I’ve listed some averages for each type of disk below. ...
It’s important to understand how VMware ESXi servers handle connections to their associated storage arrays. If we look specifically with fibre channel fabrics, we have several multipathing options to be considered. There are three path selection policy (PSP) plugins that VMware uses natively to determine the I/O channel that data will travel over to the storage device. Fixed Path Most Recently Used (MRU) Round Robin (RR) Let’s look at some examples of the three PSPs we’ve mentioned and how they behave. The definitions come from the vSphere 5 storage guide found below. ...
VMworld 2011 was held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Over 25,000 attendees this year. It was held in Las Vegas, but the sites and attractions didn’t take away from the event. Despite all the distractions that Las Vegas can provide, there was too much going on at VMworld to get caught up in the city. My favorite part of VMworld was the Hands on Labs. After signing up for the specific lab you wanted, you were ushered to your assigned desk. There were dual screen workstations setup at every desk and very straight forward instructions on how to complete the labs. These labs would get very in depth and would show you why and what was happening behind the scenes when you would perform your operations. I especially enjoyed the Netapp lab. ...