HP LeftHand SAN Solutions Support Document User Manuals User Manual VSA 7.
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1 Chapter: Designing A Virtual SAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Getting Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Concepts and Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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1 Chapter: Designing A Virtual SAN Overview The Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware® ESX Server (VSA™) enables full featured use of the SAN/iQ® software in a virtualized environment. Implementing SAN functionality within server virtualization enables many unique server and storage configurations. When deployed correctly, LeftHand Networks virtual SANs are scalable, highly available, and fully redundant.
Concepts and Terms Table 1 Glossary for the VSA Term Definition VMware Terms Virtual Switch VMware Infrastructure lets you create abstracted network devices called virtual switches (vSwitches). A vSwitch can route traffic internally between virtual machines and link to external networks. Virtual Disk A file or set of files that appears as a physical disk drive to a guest operating system. These files can be on the host machine or on a remote file system.
Table 1 Glossary for the VSA Term Definition Quorum A majority of managers required to be running and communicating with each other in order for the SAN/iQ software to function. Replication Synchronous replication of volumes across storage nodes in a cluster. Virtual Manager A manager that is added to a management group but is not started on a storage node until it is needed to regain quorum. The virtual manager must be started manually.
Configuration Requirements The following prerequisites are required for LeftHand Networks to support your virtual SAN for production use. • A qualified server running VMware ESX Server 3.0.x. Qualified servers are listed in VMware ESX Server 3.0.x systems compatibility guide, which can be found at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_systems_guide.pdf. • 1GB of memory reserved. • A single virtual CPU with at least 2000 MHz reserved.
• Be located on the same virtual switch as the VMkernel network used for iSCSI traffic. This allows for a portion of iSCSI IO to be served directly from the VSA to the iSCSI initiator without using a physical network. • Be on a virtual switch that is separate from the VMkernel network used for VMotion™. This prevents VMotion traffic and VSA IO traffic from interfering with each other and affecting performance.
• Co-location of a VSA and other virtual machines on the same physical platform without reservations for the VSA CPU and memory. • Co-location of a VSA and other virtual machines on the same VMFS datastore. • Use of VSAs on other VMware platforms such as VMware Server, Workstation, or Player. Hardware Design for VSA The hardware platform used for a virtual SAN affects the capacity, performance, and reliability of that virtual SAN.
again avoiding resource contention with the virtual SAN. For example, a platform with 10GB of RAM could host a VSA and use 8GB of memory to share for other VMs. Controllers and Hard Drives The internal disk controller and actual hard disk drives of a platform affect the capacity and IO performance of the VSA. Ideally VSAs should use storage that is hosted by many SAS or SCSI drives.
Network Adapters The number of network adapters available in a platform affects your options for configuring virtual switches. VSAs that will have a dedicated ESX Server platform only need 2 Gigabit network adapters. Platforms that will host VSAs and other virtual machines should have at least 4 Gigabit network adapters so that two adapters can be dedicated to the VSA and iSCSI traffic.
Figure 2 Example virtual network for a virtual SAN Performance and reliability can be improved even further by using more than two Gigabit adapters in the iSCSI and VSA virtual networks. Using VSAs with LeftHand SANs VSAs and physical platforms can be mixed together in SAN/iQ management groups and clusters. It is also possible to configure many VSAs with varying hardware architectures that will yield multiple performance points.
Cloning VSAs If you want to clone a VSA, you must do so while the VSA is still in the Available pool, before you add it to a management group. Cloning a VSA after it is in a management group is not supported. Tip: Configure the first VSA for RAID, Alerts, SNMP and Networking. Then create your clone with the hardware settings already configured.
VSA Managers on Physical Platforms If VSAs are running managers, ensure that those VSAs reside on separate physical platforms. Otherwise, rebooting a single physical platform could cause a loss of quorum in the management group. Performance Impact of Mixing Platforms in Clusters Mixing VSAs and physical platforms in the same SAN/iQ cluster is possible but yields unpredictable performance results. Mixing VSAs built from different hardware in the same cluster will also yield unpredictable performance.
Figure 4 Single node configuration Two-Node Configuration A two-node configuration is the smallest redundant configuration possible. Automatic failover between nodes requires a failover manager. A two-node configuration includes two VSAs in a single management group, with a single cluster, running two managers and with a failover manager added to the management group, shown in Figure 5.
Three-Node-Plus Configuration All configurations greater than two nodes can be redundant, running either 3 or 5 managers, and containing multiple clusters with as many VSAs as desired in each cluster, shown in Figure 6.
