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Storage for New VM Solution

M

ManateeMatt

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 27, 2009
Messages
145
As per a previous post my company is finally looking into real Visualization.

It was recommended that we look at the HP Storageworks p4300 g2 7.2TB SAS Starter SAN.

Anyone have any experience using this? The reason was it does our redundancy that we want and it looks like it should be fast.

From what I can see it appears to be 2 server mashed together but I don't know if you are able to separate the 2 nodes so you can rack them in 2 different physical locations, IE in rack 1 and say rack 5.
 
We have a P4000 with 3 storage clusters which includes several p4300's and some p4500 storage nodes.
All servers and storage nodes are setup for multipath to a pair of Procurve switches via 10GB SFP's and twinax cabling. Part of this storage is hosting 2 7 node Hyper-V Clusters for Development using Cluster Shared Volumes.

Now..let me first start off by telling you the good:
1. Performance is extremely good, however, if you have your sights on applications that require heavy transactions like DB's, etc, i've always separated my physcial disks etc out into a separate LUN to handle this type of environment with our EMC CX4. You are not able to do that here and I had a hard time accepting that. The disks are part of a shared pool and you create Volumes off of that shared pool. Now the idea behind this is two-fold, one, they say that disk contention etc is not really an issue because of the amount of disks you have to pull your storage from. The other is that in a storage cluster you can setup Network RAID to obtain the performance for those types of applications.
From our tests, we find that performance on our SQL Db's is fairly good, however, we are not running a high transaction enviroment and I don't have anything to compare it too.
2. The Lefthand software is great. Easy to use, very easy to manage.
3. You can increase storage very quickly. You don't have to worry about metaLUNS and the downfalls associated with using those, if you have storage available in the Cluster, you just increase the storage in the Volume you've created..etc.
4. There are many benfits like SAN replications, thin provisioning, etc but most major products offer those today anyway.

Now..on to the bad:
1. MAKE SURE that your install team knows what they are doing. Mine did not. I ended up installing it myself and reading all the whitepapers and best practices.
2. Lefthand support is ok, however, sometimes you will get conflicting information where one tech says one thing and the other says that's not supported. You have to really do your research on this product.
3. MAKE SURE you get the latest version of software, 9.x. This encompasses all the fixes and patches and it helped tremendously with performance issues and compatibility issues surrounding DSM and MPIO as well as an increase in persistant reservation capability.
4. MAKE SURE that you follow the networking best practices to the "T". They will save you headaches down the road.

If you really want to get an idea of what the interface is about, you can download a free trial of the P4000 Virtual SAN appliance for Hyper-V or VMware. That will give you some idea of the interface.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/vsa/index.html

I know you asked about Virtualization, not sure if you are going the VMware route, Hyper-V, Xen..etc. I can only speak on Hyper-V. Performance is great. I think this type of SAN, especially for Hyper-V works really well. Reading some posts here, it does seem like there are better alternatives if going the VMware route.


If I were to do it all over again, I would've looked at more options, while we're pleased with the product, the overall implementation was a disaster.
 
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Vader said:
Now..on to the bad:
1. MAKE SURE that your install team knows what they are doing. Mine did not. I ended up installing it myself and reading all the whitepapers and best practices.
2. Lefthand support is ok, however, sometimes you will get conflicting information where one tech says one thing and the other says that's not supported. You have to really do your research on this product.
3. MAKE SURE you get the latest version of software, 9.x. This encompasses all the fixes and patches and it helped tremendously with performance issues and compatibility issues surrounding DSM and MPIO.
4. MAKE SURE that you follow the networking best practices to the "T". They will save you headaches down the road.
Click to expand...

Yah something tells me Ill be installing this my self, good to know about the Software update and the best practices.

How does it compare to the EMC CX4? I keep on hearing that EMC is king on storage.
from what i am seeing i can get the chassis and then provide my own drives.
 
ManateeMatt said:
Yah something tells me Ill be installing this my self, good to know about the Software update and the best practices.

How does it compare to the EMC CX4? I keep on hearing that EMC is king on storage.
from what i am seeing i can get the chassis and then provide my own drives.
Click to expand...

EMC makes good gear...I sell it. The CX4 is your standard commercial-level array. Does Fibre Channel and iSCSI. The base unit, the CX4-120 can do a combination of 120 SATA, FC, and Flash drives. Very tight VMware integration.

It's a far more robust array then the HP you linked. The closest competitor to the HP would be the EMC AX4. That scales to 60 drives and does iSCSI or FC. Also a good array, just doesn't scale as far...but also a lot cheaper.
 
NetJunkie said:
EMC makes good gear...I sell it. The CX4 is your standard commercial-level array. Does Fibre Channel and iSCSI. The base unit, the CX4-120 can do a combination of 120 SATA, FC, and Flash drives. Very tight VMware integration.

It's a far more robust array then the HP you linked. The closest competitor to the HP would be the EMC AX4. That scales to 60 drives and does iSCSI or FC. Also a good array, just doesn't scale as far...but also a lot cheaper.
Click to expand...

How do you go about doing redundifying it? Buy 2 of them?

We are looking at starting with something small but with the ability to go massive later on.
 
ManateeMatt said:
How do you go about doing redundifying it? Buy 2 of them?

We are looking at starting with something small but with the ability to go massive later on.
Click to expand...

They are redundant. They have redundant storage processors with redundant front-end ports and back-end loops.
 
We would've upgraded and leveraged our EMC but the cost to do it was outrageous for this project when you compare the Lefthand solution "grow as you go" model. Another thing to consider with this system is that it wasn't long ago that HP aquired LeftHand..so there is some headache associated with that.

Really, when you look at it, the HP Lefthand solution is basically a server with disk array, and a small Linux app running on each box. The EMC is totatally different tech.

Can you give some more detail on what Virutalization platform you'll be using and how much storage you'll be looking at?
 
Our starting off point is going to be shared storage, and 1 dual quad core 64Gig of ram ESXi server. We plan on growing to a full deployment of 3 VM hosts and 1 management server and redundant storage for as close to a "No single point of failure" setup. We will be using VMware for this project as most of the systems we use are Linux based. Storage wise we dont need massive amounts, we are looking at about 2TB in total.

Vader, are you saying that we should really consider other solutions besides the HP systems?
 
Vader, are you saying that we should really consider other solutions besides the HP systems?
Click to expand...

I can really only tell you my experience, unfortunately, I do not use this system with ESXi. We are using Hyper-V in this environment.

What I can tell you is we also have an EMC CX4 running an ESXi cluster and VDI and it works very well.

I would take Netjunkie's advice, he certainly sees more customer configurations than I and he sells it. I know that there is a strong partnership with VMware and EMC and that would definately assist in my decision because those partnerships basically tell me that they have worked together testing as a full solution and providing an overall solution that they know works well together.

When we upgrade our VDI environment from 3.5 to Vsphere 4.1 next quarter, we'll be upgrading and leveraging our EMC CX4.
 
NetJunkie said:
HP, EqualLogic, LeftHand, EMC, NetApp. :)
Click to expand...

Im not sure 100% what you are saying here. That I should look at it?
What's the expandablilty on this stuff? Do I just throw more chassis at it and it work? I think when this works as well as it does I can see a lot of physical boxes moved over to it.


Vader, I do agree that EMC does seem to be good at intigrating well with vCenter. I will look longer and harder at emc to find ways to afford it.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
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Another thing to consider is two smaller servers that can scale. One beefy server isn't always the best route to consider when setting up an ESXi environment.

I would start with two servers 1 quad per, maybe 32GB memory running ESXi, run Vcenter as a VM make it highly availble, start with the standard SQL Express as you can easily migrate off of that if/when you expand and attach it to storage that will allow growth pending your needs. If it were a toss up between the lefthand and the EMC AX4, I would choose the AX4 because of it's tight integration with Vmware, but also you need to ask all the appropriate questions like:

How many VM's and what types of applications will require storage?
What are your requirments around High Availability..etc?
How do you plan on backing this up?
What is your local expertise on the DB side for VCenter? Oracle? SQL?
What type of network infrastructure do you have and do you plan to leverage it for storage..etc?

Planning is key to a successful implementation.
 
Networking is a non issue, we will be building new segment of network for VMware.

I have thought about using smaller boxes and spreading the load, but vmware licances cost a lot.

How many VMs - 32 is what we currently have running, we are migrating them off of a bunch of random crappy servers. These are severs that spend most of there life not doing anything.

We would be focusing on more High Availability then FT. They dont need that much uptime.

Backups - are good... I haven't really thought of how yet. I will not be deploying this solution until I have a solution.

Vcenter will be using SQL, as I know it and can work with it.

In no way am I rushing into this, I am right now getting numbers from venders and consultants to see what will cost, and really I'm checking their work to make sure I get the best solution I can for the price.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
I don't know much about the other vendors but a big plus on the Equalogic SANs is that all the management and other software for it comes at no extra cost so you don't need to monkey with licensing for your SAN software. The downside on at least the starter EQL units is that there's only one array no matter how many disks you pile in there so you need to be careful in considering whether your VMs would saturate what a single array can sustain.
 
Thuleman said:
I don't know much about the other vendors but a big plus on the Equalogic SANs is that all the management and other software for it comes at no extra cost so you don't need to monkey with licensing for your SAN software. The downside on at least the starter EQL units is that there's only one array no matter how many disks you pile in there so you need to be careful in considering whether your VMs would saturate what a single array can sustain.
Click to expand...

Good point, I completely forgot about / didn't know about licensing for SANs management. Have any suggestions on what Equalogic SAN for small VMware environment, that could expand with out many headaches?
 
Thuleman said:
I don't know much about the other vendors but a big plus on the Equalogic SANs is that all the management and other software for it comes at no extra cost so you don't need to monkey with licensing for your SAN software. The downside on at least the starter EQL units is that there's only one array no matter how many disks you pile in there so you need to be careful in considering whether your VMs would saturate what a single array can sustain.
Click to expand...

Oh, it has a cost...you just can't remove it. When you buy that second shelf to expand your EQL unit you get to buy it again. I have several customers with single shelf EQL units...when they got the price to add more space they bought other arrays instead.
 
NetJunkie said:
Oh, it has a cost...you just can't remove it. When you buy that second shelf to expand your EQL unit you get to buy it again. I have several customers with single shelf EQL units...when they got the price to add more space they bought other arrays instead.
Click to expand...
Count us as one of those...have a single shelf EQL and now have two Netapp's due to the cost of adding more space on the EQL side
 
Yeah..those types of storage platforms may be good for a SMB but if you have plans to scale then forget it. I know our orginization isn't too keen on spending the big dollar, like when we bought our CX4. Those days are over. They want a system that can grow with our business. It's much easier to have a scalable platform and it makes complete sense on the business side as we can allocate cost on a per client/application basis.
 
Well I am meeting with a EMC techincal rep on tuesday, so with anyluck he can give me some information on what I am looking for and guide me in the right direction
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
ManateeMatt said:
Well I am meeting with a EMC techincal rep on tuesday, so with anyluck he can give me some information on what I am looking for and guide me in the right direction
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
Click to expand...

Let me know what they say..and send me their quote when you get it. I'll sanity check it for you.
 
I know this thread is a little old but at my organization we just purchased both an AX4 (for our office) and a CX4 for our PROD Datacenter Price wise we spent a little over 115k for both of them. the AX4 has 15 SATA drives and the CX4 has 45 FC drives.

I have to say, I think my EMC rep treated us really well. NetJunkie, I might send you my quotes if its alright?
 
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