Storage

I’m a bit late, but better late than never. Some days ago I installed PernixData FVP 2.0 in my lab and I’m impressed! Until this installation, solutions such as PernixData FVP or VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) weren’t interesting for me or most of my customers. Some of my customers played around with vFRC, but most of them decieded to add flash devices to their primary storage system and use techniques like tiering or flash cache. Especially SMB customers had no chance to use flash or RAM to accelerate their workloads because of tight budgets. With decreasing costs for flash storage, solutions like PernixData FVP and VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC) getting more interesting for my customers. Another reason was my lab. I simply hadn’t the equipment to play around with that fancy stuff. But things have changed and now I’m ready to give it a try.

NetApp has offered Data ONTAP for some time in two flavours:

• 7-Mode
• Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT)

With cDOT, NetApp has rewritten ONTAP nearly from scratch. The aim was to create an Storage OS, that leverages scale-out architecture and storage virtualization techniques, as well as providing non-disruptive operations. NetApp has needed some release cycles to get cDOT at that point, where it provides all features that customers know from 7-Mode. With Data ONTAP 8.3, NetApp has reached this point. Even Metrocluster is now supported. That’s a huge improvement and I’m glad that NetApp has made it. But NetApp wasted no time in cutting off old habits: With ONTAP 8.3, 7-Mode is no longer offered. Okay, no big deal. Customers can migrate from 7-Mode to cDOT. Yes, indeed. But it’s not that easy as you maybe think.

A VMware vSphere cluster is nothing without shared storage. Most of the functions, like VMware HA or VMware vMotion (okay, vMotion is possible without shared storage), can only be used with a shared storage. The servers in my lab have Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBA), but buying an old and cheap Fibre Channel storage system wasn’t an option in my case. This left two options when choosing the right storage protocol: iSCSI or NFS. I tried to virtualize the local storage in my ProLiants with the HP StoreVirtual VSA and DataCore SANsymphony-V, but both were too complex for my needs and a lab environment. Because of this I decided to move the local storage into a small storage system and use iSCSI or NFS. I searched for a while for a suiteable system until Chris Wahl started blogging about the Synology DS414slim.

The next step is to connect the Synology DS414slim to my lab network. I use two HP 1910 Switches in my lab, a 8 Port and a 24 Port model. The Synology DS414slim has two 1 GbE ports, which can configured in different ways. I wanted to use both ports actively, to I decided to create a bond.

Create a bond

Browse to the admin website and go to Control Panel > Network > Network Interfaces and select “Create”. Then select “Create Bond”.

This blog post covers the setup of the volumes and shares. Depending on your disk config, variuos volume configurations are possible. The DS414slim supports all important RAID levels (Synology Hybrid RAID, Basic, JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10). I recommend to use RAID 5, if you use more then two disks. I decided to create a RAID 5 with my three Crucial M550 SSDs and use the Seagate Momentus XT as a single disk.

Chris Wahl wrote a good blog post about the VAAI-NAS plugin some days ago. I really recommend to read this posting. Because of his article, I will only describe the installation of the plugin. You can download the plugin on the Synology homepage for free.

There are two ways to install the plugin: With the vSphere Update Manager (VUM) and a host extension baseline, or with ESXCLI.

Plugin installation using the vSphere Update Manager

First of all, we need to import the plugin (host extension) to the patch repository. Open the vSphere C# client, switch to the “Home” screen and click “Update Manager” under “Solutions and Applications”. Switch to the “Patch Repository” tab and click “Import Patches”.

On October 28 2014 HP has published HP 3PAR OS 3.2.1 MU1, the first maintenance update for HP 3PAR OS 3.2.1. Beside some fixes, HP enabled in-line deduplication (Thin Deduplication) on all the systems with 3PAR GEN4 ASIC (StoreServ 7000 and 10000). Thin Deduplication does not require any license! It’s included in the base license and every customer can use it without spending money for it.

Thin Deduplication

In-line deduplication is awesome, congrats to HP for making this possible. Deduplication on primary storage is nothing new, but the way how HP 3PAR doing it, is really cool. It’s not a post-process, like NetApps deduplication technology. With HP 3PAR, deduplication happens when data enters the array. I took this figure from a HP whitepaper. It shows in a simple way what enables HP 3PAR to do in-line deduplication: The 3PAR GEN4 ASIC (Who has criticised 3PAR for using custom ASICs…?). Thin Deduplication is in line with the other 3PAR thin technologies.

Some days ago I wrote two blog posts (part I and part II) about VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) with HP 3PAR Peer Persistence. Because I wrote about it in the first of the two blog posts, allow me to take a short description, what Peer Persistence is and what it does, from that blog post:

The first part of this (short) blog series covered the basics of VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) with HP 3PAR Peer Persistence. This, the second, part will cover the basic tasks to configure Peer Persistence. Please note that this blog post relies on the features and supported configurations of 3PAR OS 3.1.3! This is essential to know, because 3.1.3 got some important enhancements in respect of 3PAR Remote Copy.

Fibre-Channel zoning

On of the very first tasks is to create zones with between the Remote Copy Fibre Channel (RCFC) ports. I used two ports from a quad-port FC Adapter for Remote Copy. This matrix shows the zone members in each Fibre Channel fabric. 3PAR OS 3.1.3 supports up to four RCFC ports per node. Earlier versions of 3PAR OS only support one RCFC port per node.

The title of this blog post mentions two terms that have to be explained. First, a VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (or VMware vMSC) is a configuration of a VMware vSphere cluster, that is based on a a stretched storage cluster. Secondly, HP 3PAR Peer Persistence adds functionalities to HP 3PAR Remote Copy software and HP 3PAR OS, that two 3PAR storage systems form a nearly continuous storage system. HP 3PAR Peer Persistence allows you, to create a VMware vMSC configuration and to achieve a new quality of availability and reliability.