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Data Progression and storage profile selection
48 Dell EMC SC Series: Best Practices with VMware vSphere | 2060-M-BP-V
The following is an advanced example of virtual machine RAID groupings in which forcing volumes into
different profiles is wanted.
LUN0 - Boot volume for ESXi
-- Data Progression: Recommended (All Tiers)
LUN1 – Templates, ISOs, General Storage
-- Data Progression: Recommended (All Tiers)
LUN10 – OS, DATA (Server group1 - High performance - four VMs – drives C, D, and E)
-- High Priority (Tier 1)
LUN20 – OS, DATA (Server group2 - Low performance - 15 VMs – drives C, D, and E)
-- Data Progression: Low Priority (Tier 3)
LUN30 – OS, DATA (Server group 3 - Application grouping - five VMs – drives C, D, and E)
-- Data Progression: Recommended (All Tiers)
Unless there is specific business need requiring a virtual machine to be pinned into a specific storage type,
tier, or RAID level, it is recommended to keep the configuration simple. Usually, the Recommended Data
Progression setting can be used to automatically classify and migrate data based on usage.
Note: As a Data Progression best practice, assign a snapshot profile that takes one daily snapshot at a
minimum and does not expire for 25 hours or more. This technique will have a dramatic effect on Data
Progression behavior and can increase the overall system performance.
11.1 On-Demand Data Progression
With the release of SCOS 6.4 and Dell all-flash arrays, On-Demand Data Progression (ODDP) was
introduced. ODDP not only enhances flash performance capabilities, but also to adds new tiering possibilities
with spinning media. This new capability allows Data Progression to run outside of its normal cycle to move
data according to rules defined in the storage profile. For example, with an all-flash system, when a snapshot
triggers ODDP, it can migrate data from the write-intensive SSD drives to the read-intensive SSD drives. This
will free up space for new incoming writes.