VM Ware SAN - HD Performance

[danrhodes]

I would disagree with this advice from Fujitsu if you want to use technologies like Live Migration (Hyper-V) or vMotion (VMware).

 

Live Migration or vMotion must have OS and Data LUN's on external shared storage(SAN).

 

Andy

 

Yeah I understand that, I think were giving advice for if you weren't planning on using these technologies and just had 1 Virtualization Server and the SAN.

[danrhodes]

I shall be looking now - I think I have it in my head sort of the best way of doing this and it will have to be a 2 stage process.

 

At the moment I have 5 servers

4 of them are 2003 and 1 is a LAMP server

 

I think what would be the best bet will be to keep my main domain controller [ which has a ULT920 tape drive in ] and purchase a meaty beast in which I can move the other servers over to. [ P to V ] & hold those locally on a RAID1 or RAID5

The SMS100 will just be for data and when more money is on the table get a better SAN move the VMs over to and run.

Anyone else done something similar ?

 

We ran P2V using Hyper-V for our Sims Server it ran very smoothly, only hickup we had was figuring out that we had to make the disks fixed disks and convert to dynamic afterwards for it to work. Overall it tookabout 3 hours from start to finish.

 

D

[Butuz]

I was advised by techies at Fujitsu that when running Hyper-V and Virtual Servers to have the Virtual OS disk on the physical servers local disk's and to have the data disk of the virual server on the SAN wether its iSCSI or Fibre attached. That was using DX80 or DX90 with fibre channel.

 

So what happens to your VM's if one of your physical servers fail? They all go down whilst your SAN sits there happy as larry with it's 99.999% uptime keeping all your data safe (but inaccesible)?

 

Sounds like strange advice to me.

 

Butuz

Edited March 26, 2010 by Butuz

[Butuz]

I would reccomend a Sun 7110 for your VM storage over NFS providing you only need 2 or 4TB of VM Storage. Yes it's only 10krpm SAS but 14 of them, 8GB RAM and Fishworks's genious ensures one super fast storage device.

 

If you need more storage you may have to look at something else.

 

Butuz

[mattx]

Anyone know what the SUN 7110 comes bundled with [ storage wise ] ?

[Butuz]

Either 16 x 146GB 10K SAS or 16 x 300GB 10K SAS. 2 Disks are lost to the operating system though so you only get 14 available for data.

 

It's a shame that they do not offer 15k disks but there must be a reason. Always remember that the number of disks is just as important than the type. I'd take 14 x 10k drives over 5 x 15k drives any day.

 

Butuz

[Duke]

mattx - What's your budget? Sun 7210 may be changing soon and 7310 and 7410 are obviously there if you've got the cash. If you're interested in the product I know a couple of people who can give you the info you need and see if there's a product that'll meet your needs in your price range.

[_Adam_]

I'm going to talk in general as I do not have information on your setup.

 

If you have 4 servers, you can easily put them all on one virtual server. You can run backup software from within a guest OS and control the tape drive on the host (for VMware ESXi, Hyper-V I would just have it on the host) so backups are not an issue.

 

I consider VMware slightly better than Hyper-V. But if budget is an issue I definitely would not discount Hyper-V. Citrix XenServer free version supports the equivalent of vmotion and by all reports it's a good product but I have not touched it.

 

If you go internal storage be aware of your limited spindles. I used 6 x 146GB 15k SAS drives and I noticed heavy queuing in peak periods which resulted in slowness across all the guest servers on the host. But it is acceptable if you want to do it in stages.

 

I now run an EVA4400 over fibre, 18 spindles (soon to be 24) and host all 15 servers on it and 60 VMware View clients, it just doesn't miss a beat.

 

A friend runs an EMC SAN which has both iSCSI and FC connectors. He is running with the 1Gb iSCSI and it handles the load fine. Should he find it does get slow in future he will switch to FC.

 

For 4 servers I would go the iSCSI path but be careful, I was burnt a few years ago with an IBM DS300 iSCSI SAN, they were just plain slow so there are lemons out there.

 

I would only consider SATA drives for cheap bulk storage such as file servers. Definitely nothing that uses a database.

[Duke]

I now run an EVA4400 over fibre [...] A friend runs an EMC SAN which has both iSCSI and FC connectors.

 

Hehe, you sir, have good funding.