A few months ago we did a popular series of chats on selecting the right server for virtualization. Now it's time to discuss what is the right storage for your virtualization deployment. The answer is of course different for everybody depending on specifc requirements, existing infrastructure, knowledge and skill level, available budget, and so on. This chat is to discuss the topic of how to select the right storage solution.


Technical Community - Background Reading


Storage Choices for Virtualiation Can Be Easy
PowerVault MD3000i Storage Consolidation Study
Details on attaching Dell iSCSI storage to VMware

Chat Transcript

DELL-ToddM Hello everybody!
DELL-ToddM We will be getting started in just a few minutes with today's chat on Storage and Virtualization
DELL-ScottH Hey guys
DELL-ToddM Are you guys there?
DELL-ScottH I vote yes
tsherbak joined.
DELL-ToddM Dave? Jake? jcurcurato?
DELL-ToddM Hey Tim!
DELL-ToddM Thanks for joining
Steve_Arrington joined.
jcurcurato Hello
tsherbak Hello
DELL-ToddM We are waiting for the crowd to gather—usually about 5 minutes or so
jcurcurato Np, going to get a fresh cup o' joe...brb
Karthik joined.
DELL-ToddM Welcome Steve!
Steve_Arrington Hello
DELL-ScottH Hello Steve!
M_ahmadian joined.
DELL-ToddM Welcome Karthik
DELL-ToddM Hey M_ahmadian
Karthik Hello Todd!
DELL-ToddM Looks like people are starting to filter in.
DELL-ToddM We will officially start the chat in just a couple of more minutes
DELL-ToddM Anybody have some pre-questions?
Jake Jake here…had to step away for a minute
DELL-ToddM Yo Jake!
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DELL-ToddM Hey Roger
Dell-RogerF Howdy.
DELL-ToddM Let's get started.
DELL-ToddM First, I will briefly intro today's topic and then I will ask Steve, Tim, and Karthik to introduce themselves
DELL-ToddM The topic for today is Storage for Virtualization 101, meaning that we are going to talk broadly about storage for virtualization :)
Karthik My name is Karthik and I am a product marketing manager at Dell for PowerVault disk storage
DELL-ToddM I would like to cover the areas of choice—DAs, iSCSI, Fibre, and so on—with some basic reasons for why to choose each
DELL-ToddM It would be really great to have any questions from anybody who is deciding what storage to use now
DELL-ToddM We will discuss them and they can be good examples for everybody
tsherbak My name is Tim Sherbak. I am a member of the EqualLogic marketing team specialized in virtualization
DELL-ToddM Thanks to Tim and Karthik for volunteering to attend as storage experts
DELL-ToddM We also have Steve. Can you intro yourself as well?
Steve_Arrington I'm Steve Arrington and I'm a Product Marketing manager for the MD product line.
Jake I am just implementing VMware. We have DAs in way of local hard drives on each of the three blades. Each blade has two HBAs installed. My plan is to connect both of the HBAs to a LUN and have the VMs stored on the SAN.
DELL-ScottH Which SAN, or is that up for discussion?
Jake Fiber connections
DELL-ToddM Jake - That sounds like a good plan. What type of SAN are we talking about? What type of storage are you considering?
Jake Unfortunately, the purchase of the SAN went the way of IBM and not Dell.
DELL-ScottH :-(
Jake It is a DS4300
Jake 10 SAS 146 GB drives, 14 500 GBb SATA drives, two drawers
DELL-ScottH Political or features decision?
DELL-ScottH What type of VMs? Are you targeting different workloads for the SAS and SATA?
Jake mainly cost, but partially Features
tsherbak left.
Jake The SAS are for high-end data apps like Exchange, the SATA are for disk to disk backups and data that is not needed to be quickly accessible.
DELL-ToddM This sounds like a good plan. You will need to be sure to size the Exchange disks properly. Most likely Exchange will need dedicated disks for mailbox server role
DELL-ToddM Why Fibre and not iSCSI?
Jake Our pinnacle SQL DB is also on the SAS. Exchange is already running on the drives. I have four TB left for VM and other uses.
DELL-ScottH How many VMs are you loading up on each blade? How many users on Exchange?
Karthik Jake, what virtualization are you planning on? ESX or Hyper-V or…?
Jake I am not entirely sure why Fibre and not iSCSI. I believe speed was a consideration; the blade center having two Fibre switches, and other servers already having Fibre cards
DELL-ScottH Which version of VMware? The ESXi?
Jake ESX servers are up and running on three M600 blades. VirtualCenter up and running on external server and running capacity planner on the 11 servers we are planning to migrate
Jake We have VI3 foundation license
DELL-ScottH Sounds like you are set; anyway, can we get you to try a fabulous Md3000i? :-) Maybe for second disaster recovery site?
Jake That will be possible for future use. We are trying to get our data center in order first and then we will move out to our DR site
DELL-ScottH Good to hear that you are planning for it; always better than having the failure and then justifying later
DELL-ToddM You mentioned disk-to-disk backups; are you planning to back up the VMs? Or just the data in the VMs with agents?
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Karthik Got it... Do you run any VMs today or will this be your first deployment?
Jake We have 30 buildings across town to choose from. 20+ elementary, 3 middle, and 3 high schools
DELL-ToddM Welcome Al - Action, Recent Room history will get you caught up
Al Thanks
Jake I converted my first yesterday to the local storage.
DELL-ScottH Yes, coming back to me now; you've been here before, right?
Jake We are running a Tivoli server for backups and not quite sure the direction we will take with VMs
Jake Yep, every Tues for the last few weeks
DELL-ScottH How easy has it been to bring the physical into virtual? Painless?
DELL-ScottH We have so many Jakes, was just making sure :-)
DELL-ToddM I have used the VMware converter to move some of my servers into VMs—it worked pretty well
Jake It was about 30-45 minutes, shut down the physical, bring up the VM and change IP. Piece of cake!
Jake Not sure on the Linux boxes we have though
Karthik Yep
DELL-ToddM There are lots of options for VM backup; I don't know much about Tivoli however :)
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Jake Is there a specific way I should set up the LUN or a good rule of thumb for disk space? General Windows 2000 or 2003 servers
Karthik Steve had to step out, but I am still here to help
DELL-ToddM In general you can follow the same type of guideline for Windows, but there are some differences
DELL-ToddM You don't usually need more than about 15 GB for the Os partition
DELL-ToddM Unless you have some kind of app that needs to install on the C:\
DELL-ToddM I actually ran across this good Webcast earlier today that talks about lots of the considerations around using storage with virtualization
Dell-Karthik Jake, size of the LUN really has to do with how many VMs you are running and how big they are. It wouldn’t be any different than in a non-virtualization environment
Jake If I go to convert a home folder share server to a VM, how do I manage its connection to the SAN for the folder? It is connected via dual Fibre connections now. What happens when I try to VM Convert it? Will it try to make a VMDK for the SAN storage? That would be horrible.
Jake Todd, Linky?
DELL-ToddM I linked to it at the bottom of this page - http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/selecting+storage+for+virtualization
Jake Thanks
DELL-ToddM The VM is not aware of the SAN directly, so it won't know about the dual Fibre connections
DELL-ToddM That will be managed by the ESX server
DELL-ToddM So you will assign the LUN at the ESX server level to the VM?
Jake In the VMware training course I took it mentioned a capacity planner that vendors have that is far and above what comes with Vi3
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Jake In researching this, there are screen shots of CP that show disk size and usage of the physical servers
DELL-ToddM When you do the convert, you will just convert the C drive, and then assign the existing LUN as an RDM (raw device mapping)
Jake The CP with Vi3 just shows CPU and memory
DELL-ToddM To the VM
Jake Cool. I was worried about that one.
Jake I have asked my Dell tech rep on the blades and VMware about it, and he said he would check into it.
Jake On the Capacity Planner
DELL-ScottH We do have some simple services that could help: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/services/adi/virtualization?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
DELL-ScottH Not sure if you'd want to go down that path
DELL-ScottH I've got a demo from using the VMware Converter, but can't remember if I had any SAN storage connected at the time
Jake http://www.vmware.com/files/images/diagrams/consolidatin_detail_large.gif
Jake Is what I want... :)
DELL-ScottH http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/vmware+demos
DELL-ScottH Services group uses that tool
DELL-ToddM The assessment services that we have include a capacity planner report
Jake So what would be the benefits of DAs versus Fibre? are we losing anything going with Fibre?
DELL-ToddM Does anybody else have questions about which storage to use? (don't want to leave anybody out)
DELL-ScottH Heck no
DELL-ScottH You are gaining
DELL-ScottH You want to vMotion, right?
Jake K, certainly don't let me run the conversation
DELL-ToddM No Fibre is a great, very solid, high performance technology (would of course be better if it was a Dell Fibre array :) )
Jake Eventually, but the license we have does not include it
DELL-ToddM I don't want to run you off Jake; just wanted make sure nobody was standing on the sidelines
Jake It would have already been set up if it was Dell, ::biggrin
DELL-ScottH I think once you get many VMs up, you'll quickly see the value of being able to move them around. It won't be hard to justify license cost
DELL-ToddM The big difference between DAs and SAN (iSCSI or Fibre) is scalability
Jake I learn as much from everyone elses questions as my own
DELL-ScottH I hear you on that one
DELL-ToddM You can continue to add additional capacity and performance with SAN, that can be shared across lots of systems
DELL-ToddM DAs are much more limited in terms of scalability, and it is attached to a single system
Dell-Karthik In general, if you want to know about interface decisions, there is a whitepaper on the Dell.com Md3000 page: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/isci_fc_sas_interface.pdf
DELL-ToddM Cost is of course a big difference as well :)
DELL-ScottH Yes, most of the Fibre arrays allow you to expand the LUNs without losing the data, and get more spindles for performance
DELL-ToddM So test and dev VMs on a virtualization server are a good candidate for DAs, assuming no need for vMotion
DELL-ToddM So if you are using the new Hyper-v Server from Microsoft to set up a test and dev lab, then you might just need DAs
DELL-ToddM See the cool new video of Hyper-v Server Install here: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/10-03-2008+hyper-v+server+install+video+for+free+-+comments
Jake I have at my disposal two disk arrays that came off of the Exchange server after moving the mailbox storage to the SAN. Any thoughts on a good use for it? Besides my music collection?
DELL-ScottH Yeah, I was going to say bittorrent bucket :-) Test bed for ESXi or Hyper-V
DELL-ScottH What arrays are they?
DELL-ToddM You could use the old Exchange server as the host. It probably has a decent amount of RAM
Jake Yeah. That is what I was thinking...maybe I can use some of my converted servers and have my own little test VM environment!
DELL-ScottH Most definitely geeking it out now!
Jake The Exchange server is still running Exchange...just that the storage is on the SAN
Dell-Karthik If you are setting up LCR on Exchange, that could be a another good use for it too. Or perhaps a temporary DR using a host-based replication....lots of choices
Dell-Karthik I meant CCR
DELL-ToddM Sorry, I was thinking that you had virtualized Exchange: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/exchange+and+vmware
Jake Huge performance gain! Disk array with three SATA drives moved to SAN with 10 SAS drives!
DELL-ScottH Yeah, you could test out the SRM, DRs, vMotion on the arrays, get VMware to give you some test licenses
DELL-ToddM That’s a huge upgrade in performance!
DELL-ScottH I'd say, you should have seen a big performance gain!
Jake The arrays are older Gateway ( I know it's a bad word, but Ted Waite went to our high schools...) They have space for 12 drives. One has Fibre and the other is iSCSI
Jake No more pop sounds from Outlook
DELL-ScottH I think I just threw up in my mouth a little :-)
Jake Rolfl!
DELL-ScottH Can you milk them?
DELL-ToddM Ted was a cool guy—Pony tail and all!
Jake I think we already have for the past five years!
DELL-ScottH Too funny! lol
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Jake Funny, most of our staff actually worked at the Gateway headquarters in North Sioux City, and now we buy Dell
Jake Now that was a battle!
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DELL-ToddM I understand, but Gateway is basically no more
DELL-ScottH I bet, like the IBM sales guys down here in Round Rock (Austin) trying to get into the city offices
DELL-ToddM What’s left is part of Acer?
DELL-ScottH Not going to happen
Jake Consumer went to Acer and Business-gov went to MPC
Jake We were a major account, so our account went to MPC
Jake No support
DELL-ToddM I didn't realize that business side went to MPC
Jake Certainly nothing like this chat
DELL-ToddM Thanks :)
DELL-ScottH We like to surround our customers on the chat and give them the warm fuzzies
DELL-ScottH Thanks
DELL-ToddM Speaking of this chat, we have come to the end of the hour
DELL-ScottH And of course the correct technical content
Jake Sorry if I monopolized
DELL-ScottH Don't be; glad to have you
DELL-ToddM Thanks to everybody for attending today. The transcript will be posted tomorrow
Dell-Karthik Thanks everyone!
DELL-ToddM Next week’s chat will focus on using EqualLogic with virtualization
DELL-ScottH Thanks everybody!
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DELL-ToddM Be sure to post questions to the site between chats!
DELL-ScottH Jake, are you on twitter?
DELL-ScottH We following you?
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jcurcurato Thank you!
jcurcurato left.
Jake Yeah, but not actively using...steehsekaj