Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads A Dell Technical White Paper Document Version 1.1 ABSTRACT: This white paper examines the common storage challenges faced by IT for virtualized application workloads and describes why the Dell™ EqualLogic™ FS7500 unified block and file storage is an ideal solution for hosting a VMware environment with virtual workloads.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Copyright © 2011 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved. Dell EqualLogic is a trademark of Dell Inc. All trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. Possession, use, or copying of the documentation or the software described in this publication is authorized only under the license agreement specified herein. Dell, Inc.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................. 2 Audience ................................................................................................................. 2 Sections .................................................................................................................. 3 Storage Options for VMware .....................
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Introduction Today datacenter administrators in businesses of all sizes are facing an efficiency challenge. Due to the rapid growth of collaboration and e-business applications and regulatory compliance requirements, server and storage needs are continually growing while IT budgets are either stagnant or shrinking.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Sections This white paper contains the following sections: • • • • • Storage Options for VMware The Dell EqualLogic FS7500 storage solution for VMware Storage Performance Test Methodology Test Results Storage Options for VMware The VMware® vSphere™ suite provides a hypervisor that supports full operating system virtualization within a virtual machine (VM).
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Both NAS and SAN infrastructures offer viable alternatives for network storage that may be appropriate for hosting multiple virtual workloads in VMware environments. So how do you know which consolidated storage solution is best for you? It depends upon the application, your workload characteristics, and your datacenter circumstances. The key is to look for flexibility in your storage solution.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Figure 1. WMware I/O stacks In a SAN, when the VMware hypervisor is using the block-based FC, FCoE, or iSCSI protocol, it creates a VMFS file system on a storage volume (shown as VMFS Volume in Figure 1) to organize and store VMware files. The VMFS file system logic runs on the VMware server.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads As storage I/O requests are received, the hypervisor either leverages the storage subsystem drivers or the network subsystem drivers to establish and maintain a connection to the datastore. In the case of block-based storage, the hypervisor uses the storage Host Bus adapter 3 (HBA) driver to connect to the block-based SAN storage device. This may be iSCSI HBAs, Fibre Channel HBAs, or even Converged Network Adapters running FCoE.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Figure 2. Unified Scale-out Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Storage System With the FS7500, you can scale both capacity and performance easily online; controllers and arrays are automatically discovered and added to the resource pool.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Finally, through the use of VMware’s Storage vMotion, the FS7500 enables administrators to leverage multiple storage tiers for each virtual machine depending upon the application needs. While some storage may remain on block-based iSCSI volumes, other workloads with more unpredictable storage needs may be migrated to the NFS volumes where they can be easily expanded.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Together these metrics can be used to quantify performance at the application level. Both of these performance metrics are related to each other. When the storage system reaches its performance limits, the transactional performance and latency values are often found to be in an inverse relationship. As latency increases, transactional performance decreases because of the increased time required to process each I/O.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Figure 3. Multiple Virtual Workloads in a VMware environment on Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Test Hardware Configurations The test hardware configuration consisted of two ESXi servers with 128GB of RAM, quad-socket, 12-core processors yielding 48 logical CPUs. Both servers were running VMware vSphere v4.1 Update 1 hypervisor.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Test Network Configuration The network configuration consisted of two dedicated Dell PowerConnect 6248 Gigabit Ethernet switches. The iSCSI and NFS traffic was isolated and differentiated from the VM traffic through the use of VLANs and physical switch segmentation. Once again, while this is usually not a recommended best practice for production networks, it provided the connectivity we needed for this test environment.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Virtual Workload Description To ensure that we simulated a real life situation for our performance measurement, we chose to run a virtual workload mix based on a set of typical datacenter workloads including business applications as well as operations associated with managing the virtual environment.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Table 1. Virtual Workload Configurations Tested on FS7500 over NFS Virtual Workload Configurations Tested on FS7500 NFS Workload Name Mail server Web 2.0 ECommerce Application Exchange 2007 Olio DVD Store 2 Workload Config.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Figure 5. Performance of Multiple Virtual Workloads in VMware using FS7500 over NFS ApplicationThroughput in VMware with Multiple Virtual Workloads on FS7500 via NFS Normalized Application Throughput 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 Email (Actions/Minute) 1 Web 2.0 (Ops/Minute) 0.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads Appendix A Test System Components The hardware configuration used in the testing process is outlined below: Hostname Mgmt IP ESX01 192.168.100. 5 Version VMware ESXi Installable 4.1.0 348481 (update 1) 192.168.100.
Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloads There were 8 1 Gbit NICs in each ESXi host server as outlined below: VMNIC vSwitch Subnet(s) MTU Purpose vmnic0 vmnic1 vmnic2 vSwitch0 192.168.100.0/2 4 192.168.101.0/24 1500 Management, Clients, Applications, vMotion vmnic3 Upstream Port type Upstream Connection TRUNK (Switch #2) VLAN 100: Management, Clients, and Applications (Switch #2) VLAN 101: vMotion TRUNK TRUNK TRUNK vmnic4 vSwitch1 vmnic5 ACCESS 192.168.
