Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere Deployment and Configuration Best practices Dell Engineering March 2021
Revisions Date Revision Author Description October 2015 2.0 Sammy Frish FluidFS System Engineering Updated for FluidFS v4 March 2021 2.1 Bryan Lusk FluidFS System Engineering Added minor updates THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. © 2021 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.
Table of contents Revisions .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 2 1 Preface........................................................................................................................................................................................... 5 1.1 Audience..............................................................................
8 4 Summary .....................................................................................................................................................................................
1 Preface 1.1 Audience This document is intended for system, network and/or storage administrators and integrators who plan to deploy the FS8600 as a storage solution for VMware vSphere-based virtualization platform. It is assumed throughout the document that the reader is familiar with the following topics: 1. 2. 3. 4. 1.2 FS8600 network attached storage platform functionality, features, installation, user interface and operation.
1.4 Terms and Abbreviations The following table summarizes terms and abbreviations used in this document: Term Description Adaptive Load Balancing (ALB) Network File System (NFS) NFS Datastore MAC address-based mechanism that balances client connections across all available network interfaces within an FS8600 system. A standard protocol for file and directory sharing over a network.
2 Introduction In vSphere-based solutions, virtual machine data is stored in a set of files holding information such as virtual hardware configuration, virtual hard disks and snapshot data. ESX hosts store this data in logical data containers called ‘datastores’. Datastores are representations of some underlying physical storage space either in the ESX server’s local hard drives or in external storage systems.
3 Solution Overview 3.1 Benefits Using standard network infrastructure, Dell’s FS8600 offers a scalable, flexible and highly available storage solution for vSphere. The key advantages of the solution are: • A single FS8600 system can act as an NFS datastore server for ESX hosts and at the same time as a file server for Windows/Linux/UNIX clients, virtual or otherwise.
Figure 1 FS8600 storage solution building blocks for vSphere Data stored in the NAS pool is evenly distributed by FluidFS among all the underlying LUNs regardless of the number of datastores. There is no need to worry about balancing space between physical volumes when performing capacity management operations. NAS volumes in FluidFS are also administrative domains. All data stored within a NAS volume is subject to common data protection, data reduction, accessibility and security policies.
space boundaries and they all submit to common data protection and accessibility policies, we allocate a single NAS volume to store them. To differentiate template classes and purposes you can map multiple datastores to the NAS volume. It is best practice to keep source templates intact and separated from the production clones to be able to change them whenever required without affecting live VMs.
4 Network Infrastructure and Configuration This section describes various considerations and recommendations related to the physical network infrastructure as well as its logical configuration. 4.1 Managing Client Files and Datastores in a Single File System The FS8600 in a vSphere environment can act as an NFS datastore server for virtual machine files and at the same time as a file server for application and user files.
4.2 Switch Topology The switch infrastructure that connects to the FS8600 should be redundant (See example on Figure 2) in order to support and maintain the appliance’s high availability. Architecturally, three guiding principles should be used to construct a best practice switch connectivity topology: • Avoid any single points of failure. • Ensure sufficient inter-switch throughput. • Keep the FS8600 client ports and ESX hosts datastore traffic ports in the same broadcast domain.
4.4 FS8600 Client Network Configuration The client network in the FS8600 should be configured to accommodate the logical separation of guest OS data and application/user data into VLANs and subnets. Dell recommends having at least two subnets, each in a different VLAN, to allocate these two main workloads. Additional subnets may be needed to support the NFS datastore traffic load sharing methodology chosen for the solution (See “NFS Datastore Traffic Load Sharing” on Page 14).
5 NFS Datastore Traffic Load Sharing ESX Host 3 2 ST 1 Port 4 5 Lnk Act Lnk Act 0 1 6 1 2 Gb 1 Gb 2 Gb 3 Gb 4 NFS Datastores Network Figure 4 Load Sharing among ESX Host Links Using more than a single physical NIC on each ESX host provides fault tolerance and, when properly set up, can significantly increase the aggregated logical link throughput.
ESX Host FluidFS Appliance 4 5 ST Port Lnk Act 0 2 Lnk Act 1 3 1 6 1 2 Gb 1 Gb 2 Gb 3 Gb 4 VMK0 = 10.0.0.1/24 VMK1 = 10.0.1.1/24 10.0.0.0/24 Path Between VMK0 and VIP00/VIP01 NFS Datastores Network VIP00 = 10.0.0.10/24 VIP01 = 10.0.0.11/24 VIP10 = 10.0.1.10/24 VIP11 = 10.0.1.11/24 Switch Path Between VMK1 and VIP10/VIP11 Infrastructure 10.0.1.0/24 Figure 5 Subnet Based Load Sharing For example, a host with two teamed VMNICs and two VMkernel ports vmk0 → 10.0.0.1/24 and vmk1 → 10.0.1.
FluidFS Appliance ESX Host 3 4 ST 1 Port Lnk Act GRN=10G ACT/ LNK A Lnk Act GRN=10G ACT/ LNK A GRN=10G ACT/ LNK B 0 GRN=10G ACT/ LNK B GRN=10G ACT/ LNK A 6 GRN=10G ACT/ LNK A 2 GRN=10G ACT/ LNK B 5 GRN=10G ACT/ LNK B 1 1 2 Gb 1 Gb 2 Gb 3 Gb 4 VMK0 = 10.0.0.1/24 NFS Datastores Network VIP0 = 10.0.0.10/24 VIP1 = 10.0.0.11/24 DS2 10.0.0.11:/Vol2 DS1 10.0.0.
6 Virtual Network Configuration As mentioned in “Managing Client Files and Datastores” on Page 11, segmentation of traffic types is desired for better management and increased security. The implementation of this approach starts with the vSphere virtual network configuration, as described below. 6.1 NFS Datastore Traffic Configuration Dell recommends creating a vSwitch (can be standard or distributed) exclusively for NFS datastore traffic in its own VLAN with the following configuration: 1. 2. 3.
Figure 9 6.2 Teaming and Failover Settings Virtual Machine Traffic Configuration Ideally, use a separate virtual switch with separate physical links and in a separate VLAN for the virtual machines’ outbound traffic to the FS8600 client data exports and shares.
7 Datastores Configuration NFS Datastores in vSphere represent ESX host mounts, each accessing an NFS export over an IP address. Note that an ESX host creates a single I/O connection to the FS8600 for every individual datastore. Regardless of the teaming or load sharing method, this connection is given (and limited to) a single physical path to the FS8600, composed of one physical link from the ESX host to the switch and one from the switch to the FS8600 controller.
When setting it to 256, also set the Net.TcpipHeapSize to 32 and Net.TcpipHeapMax to 128. The configuration of these parameters is done via the ESX host advanced settings. Note: Changes on Net.TcpipHeapSize and Net.TcpipHeapMax require a host reboot to take effect. 7.3 Configuring NFS Datastores NFS datastores in FluidFS reside in NAS volumes. These are elastic virtual storage containers used to manage the entire NAS pool.
3. 4. On each export, grant read and write access for “everybody” to the ESX hosts IP addresses. Mark the NAS volume as VMware application aware It is an FS8600 best practice to group virtual machines with common management policies in the same datastores. 7.4 Provisioning Virtual Machines Dell recommends cloning virtual machines using the vSphere Web Client plugin. The plugin is designed to create multiple copies of VMs at once whether as full copies or as space efficient thin clones.
To ensure consistency, use the following procedure to clone datastores: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 7.7 Ensure the virtual machines residing in the base datastore are shut down. In the FS8600, take a snapshot of the datastore NAS volume. Take a consistent snapshot of the NAS volume where the datastore resides Make a NAS volume clone from the snapshot. Export the root folder of the clone volume and grant permissions to the ESX hosts IP addresses to access it.
8 Summary The deployment of the FS8600 as a storage system for a vSphere solution is a multi-layered process consisting of network infrastructure considerations, configuration procedures and management of multiple workloads over different protocols. As such, it is key to make a preliminary design based on the topics listed in this document to achieve maximum resource utilization and high availability.
