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All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. Revision Date: November 2013 Revision Number: MR‐1WP‐EMCSTORVMWBP Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 1 This course covers the considerations and ramifications of implementing EMC storage arrays with a vSphere vCenter managed, ESXi host environment. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 2 Before addressing the considerations and best practices for implementation of storage in an ESXi environment, we must consider how resources are consumed on ESXi and their overall impact. Storage presentation is considered a single aspect of any ESXi configuration, but another key factor is the storage array connectivity infrastructure. There are many dependencies between all of these aspects, so it is important that we discuss how these seemingly unrelated topics can affect a storage deployment goal. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 3 In lesson one we will explore some of the general environment considerations needed for implementing a VMware solution. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 4 VMware offers a diverse product line so it is important to clarify what is expected in a vSphere offering. VMware features are governed by the license obtained. If a VMware feature or product is not licensed, it will not be supported. In EMC engagements, it is common to expect the ESXi host to have an Enterprise Plus license and support all the features of this license. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 5 I/Os are the major metric by which storage arrays, applications, and interconnect infrastructures are evaluated. These metrics are often documented in Service Level Agreements (SLA), which are goals that have been agreed to and must be achieved and maintained. As storage plays a very large part of any computing solution, there are many aspects that must be considered when implementing these SLAs and defining service requirements of the solution. Some of these considerations include, but are not restricted to: • Connectivity infrastructure • Physical cables • Protocols • Array type • Physical architecture Cache Buses Spinning or solid‐state drives Software enhancements • Disk connectivity interfaces: FC, SAS, SATA Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 6 Prior to focusing on storage array presentation, it is important to consider the storage presentation models supported by VMware. Presenting a virtual machine with local storage is a possibility in most deployments, but not a consideration of this course. When it is used, it can restrict some of the functionality expected in an Enterprise level deployment, e.g., a local storage datastore can only be accessed by one machine and is usually a single point of failure (SPOF) in the environment. Storage array presentation is the more preferred method of storage presentation in an Enterprise environment, as this model is typically designed to meet specific needs of an application specific workload or SLA. However, the final configuration of a solution is not restricted to a single type of configuration and most environments may be comprised of many different aspects both array based and local storage dependent upon the most suitable resolution of the solutions expectations. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 7 With any environment there are many factors affecting the infrastructure. Depending upon the considerations and their importance, the design could change radically from one originally envisioned. The design of any infrastructure is to achieve the highest possible success in meeting the majority of the demands expected. This means that compromise and segmentation of purpose are always factors in design along with the points listed here. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 8 The key points for LUN utilization are: • The choice of RAID level and disk type to match the specific workload proposed for the LUN • Each LUN should only contain a single VMFS datastore to segment workload characteristics of differing Virtual Machines and prevent resource contention. However, if multiple Virtual Machines do access the same VMFS datastore, using disk shares to prioritize virtual machine I/O is recommended. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 9 Any solution can produce various combinations of LUN presentation models. Both large and small LUNs can be presented. One reason to create fewer, larger LUNs is to provide more flexibility to create VMs without storage administrator involvement. Another reason is more flexibility for resizing virtual disks and snapshots and fewer VMFS datastores to manage. A reason to create smaller LUNs is to waste less storage space by building in storage overhead for growth and removing it from the global pool of storage in the array. Smaller LUNs may be preferred if there are many differing performance profiles required in the environment along with varied required RAID level support. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 10 One of the key concerns in any storage array architecture is latency. This always causes performance degradation and should be minimized as much as possible. There are many areas that introduce latency but there are some general rules that can be applied to start reducing the impact of latency. One of the first considerations is the use of Flash drives with the vSphere Flash Infrastructure for host swap files and the use of vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC). Another key consideration is the use of storage arrays that make use of vStorage APIs (vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)). This greatly enhances the performance of any infrastructure by off‐loading operations to native array tools and functionality and frees ESXi resources for other task processing. Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC Storage Integration with VMware vSphere Best Practices 11 The final, and possibly the most recognizable storage infrastructure consideration, is overall solution bandwidth. This refers not only to interconnectivity bandwidth, but internal array and server bus bandwidth,