White Papers

BP1024 Scaling and Best Practices for Virtual Workload Environments with the FS7500 2
1 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 along with regulatory compliance
requirements, server and storage needs are continually growing while IT budgets are either stagnant
or shrinking. To address the server side efficiency issues, virtualization solutions such as those from
VMware®, Microsoft®, and Citrix®, where resources of a single physical server are shared across
multiple virtual machines, deliver high asset utilization and eliminate the problems that result from
having to maintain and manage large number of underutilized physical servers. Similarly, the problem
of underutilization of storage resources associated with Direct Attached Storage (DAS) is dramatically
reduced with networked storage. This is particularly important for a virtual environment because the
only way to take full advantage of server virtualization is with consolidated storage pools. For example,
the ability to move live virtual machines is only enabled with shared storage devices.
Hypervisors, such as those from VMware and Citrix, support both networked storage options—storage
area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS). Over time, many datacenters may end up
with multiple islands of SAN and NAS with separate vendor-specific storage management consoles
that are not easy to use. Once assigned to virtualization engines (such as VMware) the ability to easily
grow the namespace capacity and performance in NAS is beneficial. Also NAS offers lower cost-per-
port. When using NAS in a virtualized environment, some tuning can be performed for optimal
operation.
The goal of this paper is to establish:
• Best practices for configuring the supporting network and storage infrastructure when
deploying the Dell™ EqualLogic™ FS7500 Unified Storage Solution in a virtualized
environment based on VMware
• Scalability characteristics of the storage solution when supporting a virtualized environment
hosting a mix of enterprise applications
• Best practices and characteristics of the storage solution when supporting different virtual
infrastructure operational scenarios
1.1 Audience
This paper directly benefits solution architects, storage network engineers, system administrators, and
IT managers who need to understand how to design, properly size, and deploy FS7500 for use in their
virtualized environments. It provides proof to purchasing decision makers that FS7500 and underlying
FluidFS can keep up with the I/O demands and routine virtual infrastructure operations in a virtualized
environment. In addition, it provides scaling guidelines.
1.2 Terms
EqualLogic PS Series Group and Member
The foundation of the EqualLogic storage solution is the PS Series group, which includes
one or more PS Series arrays (group members) connected to an IP network and managed
as a single system.
EqualLogic Storage Pool