MICROSOFT AZURE STORSIMPLE 8000 SERIES DEPLOYMENT BEST PRACTICES Version: 1.1 Copyright This document is provided "as-is". Information and views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, may change without notice. Some examples depicted herein are provided for illustration only and are fictitious. No real association or connection is intended or should be inferred. This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy, use and modify this document for your internal, reference purposes. © 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows Azure, StorSimple, Hyper-V, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, SQL Server, Windows, Windows PowerShell, and Windows Server are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 5 Target audience ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 5 iSCSI network ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 6 Dual fabric iSCSI design ........................................................................................................................................................................ 6 Cloud connectivity .................................................................................................................................................................................. 8 Storage accounts performance .......................................................................................................................................................... 8 Initiator configuration for the StorSimple device ........................................................................................................................ 10 General BIOS settings.......................................................................................................................................................................... 10 NIC-PCIe slot allocation ....................................................................................................................................................................... 11 Server and NIC tuning ........................................................................................................................................................................ 12 Multipath input/output (MPIO) observations and configuration ........................................................................................... 13 Multisession MPIO configuration for mixed volume types and low latency ............................................................ 13 iSCSI session-path ID to IP mapping .................................................................................................................................... 13 iSCSI sessions ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 18 Volume Shadow Copy service (VSS) .............................................................................................................................................. 21 Appendix A: Creating virtual NICs on Windows Server ............................................................................................................22 Table of Tables Table 1 Bios recommendations ........................................................................................................................................................ 10 Table 2 NIC settings............................................................................................................................................................................. 12 Table 3 Logical connection table for the selected locally pinned volume disk ID ............................................................ 14 Table 4 Logical connection table for the selected cloud tiered volume disk ..................................................................... 14 Table of Figures Figure 1 iSCSI network topology for mixed volume types 7 3 Figure 3 Hypervisor iSCSI sessions .................................................................................................................................................. 19 Figure 4 iSCSI sessions with hyper NICs ........................................................................................................................................20 4 Introduction This document will provide the best practices around how to build a high performance and low latency environment while mixing volume types in your StorSimple 8000 series devices. This document will cover: • iSCSI network design • Cloud Connectivity • Initiator configuration with the StorSimple device In the following sections, we will illustrate how to configure and optimize the previously mentioned settings to achieve predictable performance with your StorSimple 8000 series device. Target audience This document is intended for storage administrators and solution architects who deploy StorSimple solutions as well as individuals who are familiar with server hardware and software settings. 5 iSCSI network Dual fabric iSCSI design In order to deliver high availability, best performance, and lowest latencies, the following recommendations are made independent from the network fabric speed. Recommendation Make sure that you can monitor and collect performance and utilization statistics from all your network resources to pinpoint any component that behaves badly in your infrastructure. The following reference design highlights the main components and their physical connectivity for highly available, low latency, and high throughput iSCSI fabric. 6 Table 1 Port configuration Server Vlan # Switch StorSimple 8000 Controller and Port # Server1 10Gb NIC0 100 1 C0-Data2 and C1-Data2 Server1 10Gb NIC1 200 2 C0-Data3 and C1-Data3 Server1 1Gb NIC0 100 1 C0-Data2 and C1-Data2 Server1 1Gb NIC1 200 2 C0-Data3 and C1-Data3 Azure 300 3 C0 Data0 and C1 Data 0 Azure 400 4 C0 Data1 and C1 Data1 Figure 1 iSCSI network topology for mixed volume types High Availability iSCSI Network Topology Example 10Gb Switch #1 Server 1 10Gb Switch #2 Server1 Server1 1Gb NIC0 10Gb NIC1 Server1 Server1 10Gb NIC0 C1-D3 10Gb NIC1 C0-D3 StorSimple 8000 Series Appliance C0-D2 C0-D2 C1-D2 C1-D2 C0-D3 C1-D3 C0-D0 C0-D0 C1-D0 C1-D0 C0-D1 C1-D1 Azure Vlan Azure Vlan Switch #3 Azure Switch #4 7 Cloud connectivity For optimal cloud connectivity performance of StorSimple, we recommend the following best practices. • Ensure that your StorSimple device has the appropriate dedicated bandwidth that your device model and environment require available at all times. This bandwidth should not be shared (or allocation should be guaranteed through the use of quality of service (QoS) policies) with any other applications. • Ensure that network connectivity to the Internet is available at all times. Sporadic, unreliable, or unavailable Internet connections to the devices will result in an unsupported configuration. • Maintain the SSL certificate without any alteration. • Isolate the iSCSI and cloud traffic by having dedicated network interfaces on your device for iSCSI and cloud access. For more information, see how to configure network interfaces on your StorSimple device. • Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) is not supported. • Configure and connect redundant cloud-enabled interfaces on your StorSimple device. • Make sure that the firewall in your datacenter has the correct ports opened. For more information, refer to: StorSimple software, high availability, and networking requirements. Storage accounts performance To ensure optimal performance of StorSimple, check the performance of storage accounts before you deploy the StorSimple device. We recommend that you measure the storage performance per datacenter within your region and, more specifically, on the storage account level, The following online tools can be used to measure and test region-based datacenter performance. - Azure Storage latency test - Azure Storage large file upload speed test - Azure Storage blob download speed test 8 The sample output from upload speed tests with different size/thread variations is listed below. Table 1: File upload speed test File name File size Region Block size(kb) Thread Upload speed Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 4 45.64 MB/s Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 4 45.61 MB/s Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 4 45.57 MB/s Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 4 45.53 MB/s Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 4 45.39 MB/s Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 8 42.07 MB/s Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 8 42.03 MB/s Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 8 41.99 MB/s Test File.iso 248.44 MB West US 4096 16 42.66 MB/s Following the StorSimple deployment,