SERVICE-ORIENTED STORAGE TIERING: A 2014 APPROACH TO A 2004 PROBLEM Daniel Stafford Senior Systems Engineer EMC Corporation [email protected] Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 4 Defining the Sandbox ............................................................................................................. 4 Why Consider Storage Service Tiering on a VMAX? .............................................................. 5 Designing the System ................................................................................................................ 7 Data Capture and Analysis ..................................................................................................... 7 Translating Analysis into Physical Design ............................................................................... 8 Translating Design into Cost Model .......................................................................................10 Describing Tiers ....................................................................................................................13 Configuration ............................................................................................................................14 VMAX Configuration ..............................................................................................................14 Host IO Limit Configuration ................................................................................................14 Storage Group Configuration .............................................................................................15 Pool Configuration .............................................................................................................17 FAST Policy Configuration .................................................................................................18 Front-End Adapter (FA) Allocation .....................................................................................19 Path Balancing ...................................................................................................................20 vSphere Configuration ...........................................................................................................21 VMDK Limits ......................................................................................................................21 Use of Storage DRS and Datastore Clusters .....................................................................23 Datastore Size ...................................................................................................................24 Queue Depth .....................................................................................................................24 Monitoring and Reporting ..........................................................................................................25 Native Monitoring in Unisphere for VMAX ..............................................................................25 Performance Troubleshooting ............................................................................................25 Unified Reporting in EMC Storage Resource Management (SRM) ........................................26 Simpler Aggregated Front End Statistics ............................................................................26 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2 VMDK-Level IO Reporting and Mis-Tiering Detection ........................................................27 Tier Capacity Reporting .....................................................................................................29 Automation and Orchestration ...................................................................................................30 Use of ViPR ...........................................................................................................................30 Acknowledgments .....................................................................................................................31 Appendix A: Input Data Extraction.............................................................................................32 Step 0: Create your database schema ...............................................................................32 Step 1: Parse Storage Group Mappings .............................................................................32 Step 2: Parse MiTrend Output ............................................................................................36 Step 3: Produce output file .................................................................................................37 Step 4: Load the output data into Excel ..............................................................................41 Glossary....................................................................................................................................42 Disclaimer: The views, processes, or methodologies published in this article are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes, or methodologies. 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 3 Introduction Defining the Sandbox The idea of defining IT offerings as a catalog of standard services has been with the industry for many years now. Whether your organization already has a well-defined set of offerings, or if as a Storage/Virtualization architect you are leading your enterprise on this journey for the first time, using the best available tools to provide consistent, competitive service is crucial. To that end, this article will describe a set of best practices for building a tiered service offering using VMAX® arrays, with special consideration given to how to best integrate with a VMware- based virtualization stack. Host level integration must be considered in such an environment because making a change to the way storage is presented can often have unexpected consequences up the stack. In some cases these consequences can be dealt with simply. Here we will consider some cross-silo effects of implementing storage tiering, and the best practices that can allow multiple groups to manage the environment together peacefully. To do this, however, we should first define the ideal characteristics of our end-state. Tiered Performance Offerings The solution should provide different categories of storage based on the performance required by the application. As enterprise applications vary widely in their performance needs, the model should be capable of running the gamut from low-cost archival-class storage all the way to pure- SSD levels of performance. Application-level Flexibility Change in an application is inevitable, as are mistakes by the administrators running it. To that end our solution should be forgiving and allow the class of service provided to an application to be modified quickly and without disruption. Environment-level Flexibility Even the most mature organizations will have trouble defining the total need of all applications. In organizations where defined tiers are new, the very act providing those tiers can and will change the behavior of application owners. The solution should easily allow the definition of a class of service to change, and provide paths to shift capacity between classes of service as demand for each class changes. 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 4 Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons The performance levels published should be enforced. This prevents runaway applications from monopolizing the resources of the stack and reducing service levels for all applications. Transparent The solution should provide reporting on the usage of the classes of service provided and should provide a view into whether the published service levels are being met. This should provide the basis for a practical chargeback system. This reporting should also help identify applications that may be mis-tiered so that action can be taken to either improve the performance of those applications, or conversely, save the application-owner from unnecessarily high chargeback. Simplicity The extra engineering required to put a tiered service offering in place and maintain it is non- trivial. Care should be taken to ensure that this extra effort is not too onerous for any group in the organization. Too much complexity of administration not only eats away at the benefits provided, but is also an invitation to an unreliable system. Automatable The solution should have a clearly defined set of rules that allow it to be driven by an automation/orchestration engine. Where examples are required, we will use VMware’s vCenter Orchestrator (VCO) in tandem with EMC ViPR®. Why Consider Storage Service Tiering on a VMAX? The Economics of Shared Infrastructure While every large organization has a few applications that require customized engineering of the infrastructure stack, it is not feasible to provide this for every application for a number of reasons: Customization takes time, but the business wants the application online tomorrow Customization requires engineers, and the business isn’t opening up new job requisitions without a fight Customized stacks waste resources – those custom stacks will often have excess capacity on one or more level, whether that means idle processors, unused storage capacity, or unused bandwidth 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 5 In contrast, storage consolidation provides