StarWind Virtual SAN VVOLs Technical Preview Guide

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1 #1 HyperConverged Appliance for SMB and ROBO StarWind Virtual SAN JANUARY 2016 TECHNICAL PAPER

2 Trademarks StarWind, StarWind Software and the StarWind and the StarWind Software logos are registered trademarks of StarWind Software. StarWind LSFS is a trademark of StarWind Software which may be registered in some jurisdictions. All other trademarks are owned by their respective owners. Changes The material in this document is for information only and is subject to change without notice. While reasonable efforts have been made in the preparation of this document to assure its accuracy, StarWind Software assumes no liability resulting from errors or omissions in this document, or from the use of the information contained herein. StarWind Software reserves the right to make changes in the product design without reservation and without notification to its users. Technical Support and Services If you have questions about installing or using this software, check this and other documents first - you will find answers to most of your questions on the Technical Papers webpage or in StarWind Forum. If you need further assistance, please contact us. Copyright StarWind Software Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of StarWind Software. In 2016, Gartner named StarWind Cool Vendor for Compute Platforms. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. About StarWind StarWind is a pioneer in virtualization and a company that participated in the development of this technology from its earliest days. Now the company is among the leading vendors of software and hardware hyper-converged solutions. The company s core product is the years-proven StarWind Virtual SAN, which allows SMB and ROBO to benefit from cost-efficient hyperconverged IT infrastructure. Having earned a reputation of reliability, StarWind created a hardware product line and is actively tapping into hyperconverged and storage appliances market. In 2016, Gartner named StarWind Cool Vendor for Compute Platforms following the success and popularity of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. StarWind partners with world-known companies: Microsoft, VMware, Veeam, Intel, Dell, Mellanox, Citrix, Western Digital, etc. TECHNICAL PAPER 2

3 Contents Introduction... 4 System Requirements... 5 Before you begin... 5 VMware virtual volumes... 5 Configuring StarWind VSA... 5 Adding a Storage Provider to vcenter Server... 6 Protocol Endpoint... 7 Setup ISCSI Connections... 7 Virtual Volume Datastore... 8 Create a Virtual Volume Datastore... 8 Capability profiles... 8 Create Storage Policy... 9 Deploying Virtual Machine with Storage Policy Troubleshooting Known Issues Contacts TECHNICAL PAPER 3

4 Introduction Virtual volumes (VVOLs) are a new storage integration and management framework supported in VMware vsphere 6. VVOLs virtualize storage arrays in order to offer simplified storage provisioning and consumption. StarWind VVOLs Technical Preview allows you to test the VVOLs feature for non-production use cases in StarWind Virtual SAN environment and see how StarWind implements the latest storage technology from VMware. The full set of up-to-date technical documentation can always be found here, or by pressing the Help button in the StarWind Management Console. For any technical inquiries please visit our online community, Frequently Asked Questions page, or use the support form to contact our technical support department. TECHNICAL PAPER 4

5 System Requirements 1 ESXi 6.0 host with 8GB RAM minimum and Intel 2GHz+ 64-bit x86 Dual Core CPU managed by vcenter vcpu, 4 GB RAM, 50GB Storage for StarWind VM Dedicated vswitch for ISCSI traffic Before you begin Before you begin, complete the following steps. 1. Download the StarWind VSA with VVOLs Technical Preview from 2. Use OVF Deployment Guide to set up StarWind VSA. 3. After you have installed StarWind VSA, use this guide to configure and manage virtual volumes. VMware virtual volumes With the release of vsphere 6, VMware has introduced the new storage integration and management framework VVOLs. The concept changes, however. Virtual volumes come in the stead of VMDK-disks which are considered as the basic frame storage element. New technology focuses on the applications features and provides much more efficient possibilities to manage the underlying storage in virtualized environments. This approach allows to automate manual procedures performing, thus simplifies all disk operations. Based on the automation policies, it enables the provisioning and monitoring at a virtual machine (VM) level, making all tasks much easier. VVOLs de facto coalesce SAN and NAS devices into logical data pools, that are called Virtual Datastores. Therefore, virtual disks are initially defined at the physical storage layer and became the basic unit for management of a storage array excepting the need for VMFS. Configuring StarWind VSA StarWind VSA come fully preconfigured and you don t need to do something on this site. After VM had been provisioned, Storage Provider(SP) URL had been created as well. Now you can add it to vcenter. TECHNICAL PAPER 5

6 Adding a Storage Provider to vcenter Server To add a Storage provider into vcenter using the vsphere Web Client: 1. In the Home center panel select vcenter server inventory list icon 2. On left panel find and click on the vcenter server that you are adding the Storage Provider to. 3. On the center panel open the Manage tab and select Storage Providers 4. Click the Register a new Storage Provider icon 5. Add the following information into the New Storage Provider Wizard: Name: Starwind VVOL URL: <IP of Starwind VM>:9991/vasa Username: root Password: starwind At this point, you should verify certificate, which will appear in alert, with certificate on VASA Provider. To get know certificate on VASA Provider you should run this commands in cmd shell with administrator rights inside StarWind VM: wmic -namespace:\\root\starwind path STARWIND_ClusterService call GetVASAInfo TECHNICAL PAPER 6

7 Protocol Endpoint Protocol Endpoints (PEs) is the communication mechanism that provides ESXi host with the access to the storage system. Virtual machines connect to their associated VVOLs datasores through the paths determined by these endpoints. All I/O requests are submitted over the Protocol Endpoints to the VVol datastore which resides on the storage system. One PE can handle a big amount of such operations and connect to plenty VVOLs. For StarWind VSA Protocol Endpoints works through iscsi protocol. Setup ISCSI Connections 1. In the vsphere Web Client, point to the Home icon and select Hosts and Clusters. 2. In the left panel, select preferred ESXi host. 3. In the center panel, click the Manage tab and click Storage. 4. In Storage Adapters panel, select the iscsi software adapter. 5. In the Adapter Details panel, click the Targets tab. 6. On the Targets tab, click the Add button. 7. In the Add Send Target Server window, enter the storage provider IP address in the iscsi Server text box. This is IP address of NIC in Starwind VSA VM wich used for ISCSI traffic. Click OK. 8. In the center panel, click the Rescan all storage adapters icon. 9. You need to repeat these steps on each ESX host. To verify that a protocol endpoint is available and determine its properties: PLEASE NOTE: PE will appear at ESXi host only after VVol Datastore will be created 1. In the left panel, select your preferred ESXi host. 2. In the center panel, click the Manage tab and click Storage. 3. In the left panel, select Protocol Endpoint and check the status of Starwind PE. TECHNICAL PAPER 7

8 Virtual Volume Datastore Virtual volumes are grouped inside the VVOLs datastores which represent storage containers in vcenter. VVOLs datastores could be used with traditional VMFS and NFS datastores, but they also offer richer capabilities associated with array and provide datastore level functionality. The first thing to highlight is that the such granular architecture allows virtual volumes to map directly into physical storage pool. Given that currently all storages are managed at the LUN or filesystem level, VVOLs technology goes much deeper and provides with possibility to manage VMs or virtual disks independently at the virtual machine level, making storage the VM-centric. Therefore, you can provision some partition of the physical storage pool to VVOLs datastore and it is a set of dedicated volumes. VVOLs locate at the storage containers called VVOLs datastores which can be built using one or more capability profiles. These profiles are configured at physical storage level. VVOLs datastores dependent on the multiple profiles or just utilize a single one. You could also provision some amount of storage capacity to the VVol datastore according to the certain capability profile. Create a Virtual Volume Datastore 1. In the vsphere Web Client, in the left panel, right-click your data center and select Storage > New Datastore. 2. In the New Datastore window, click Next on the Location page. 3. On the Type page, select VVOL and click Next. 4. On the Name and container selection page, in the Datastore name text box enter the name of datastore, for example VVOL-Datastore. 5. In the Backing Storage Container list, select iscsivvol Starwind iscsi container and click Next. 6. On the Select hosts accessibility page, select your assigned ESXi host name check box and click Next. 7. On the Ready to complete page, click Finish. Capability profiles PLEASE NOTE: In StarWind VVOLs Technical Preview, you cannot create new capability profile. There is only one embedded preconfigured profile. TECHNICAL PAPER 8

9 Capability profiles define performance and capacity specifications of the VVOLs datastores. Such information as type of storage, caching and provisioning method can be found at profiles. For StarWind VVol datastores, these characteristics are based on storage devices. When a virtual volume is created, it is assigned a storage policy profile. The VVol datastore will show as compatible storage in vcenter or the vsphere Web Client if the associated capability profiles meet VMware storage policy requirements. IMPORTANT NOTE: Capability profiles has to be created before you can create a VVol datastore. In release, StarWind will support this list of Capabilities: Drive Type RAM Cache SSD Cache Synchronous Replication Asynchronous Replication Snapshot Deduplication Create Storage Policy 1. In the center panel, click the VM Storage Policies icon. TECHNICAL PAPER 9

10 2. In the center panel, review the storage policies created by default and click the Create new VM storage policy icon. 3. In the Create New VM Storage Policy window, click the vcenter Server drop-down menu and select your assigned VMware vcenter Server name. 4. In the Name text box, specify the name for Policy and click Next. 5. On the Rule-Sets page, click Next. 6. Configure the virtual machine storage policy. 7. On the Rule-Set 1 page, click the Rules based on data services drop-down menu and select the assigned virtual volume service provider. 8. Click the Add rule drop-down menu and select capability that you want to use. 9. Repeat if you want to add additional of capabilities. 10. Click Next. 11. Click Finish. Deploying Virtual Machine with Storage Policy 1. In the center panel, click the VMs and Template icon. 2. In the left panel, right-click your data center and select New Virtual Machine > New Virtual Machine. 3. On the select storage page, click the VM Storage Policy drop-down menu and select the preferred policy configured earlier. The virtual volume datastores are the only compatible storage options. 4. In the datastore list, select StarWind VVOL datastore and click Next. 5. On the Ready to complete page, click Finish. 6. After create virtual machine task is completed, in the left panel, select earlier configured virtual machine. 7. In the center panel, scroll down to show the VMStoragePolicies panel. The virtual machine is in compliance with its storage policy. TECHNICAL PAPER 10

11 Troubleshooting In StarWind Technical Preview there is methods how to reset all settings to default statements. To reset StarWind target settings and delete all devices you should run this command in cmd shell with administrator rights inside StarWind VM: C:\Program Files\StarWind Software\Starwind\starwind_reset.cmd In order to recreate the VASA Provider and all certificates for it you should use one of these commands. There are two ways how to VASA Provider can be registered by IP address or by DNS name. Also, it would be needed to register VASA provider at another vcenter. If you want to use IP address or you don t have Active Directory service running, you should run this command in cmd shell with administrator rights inside StarWind VM (Before this you need to get know MAC address of management NIC): wmic -namespace:\\root\starwind path STARWIND_ClusterService call ResetVASA BindToInterfaceMAC=<TargetMAC> In case if you have Active Directory service implemented in your infrastructure you should use domain name. Add StarWind VM to Active Directory and use domain name for the Storage Provider registration. To reset VASA Provider by name, you should run this command in cmd shell with administrator rights inside StarWind VM: wmic -namespace:\\root\starwind path STARWIND_ClusterService call ResetVASA Also, there is command to get know information of VASA Provider URL, certificate: wmic -namespace:\\root\starwind path STARWIND_ClusterService call GetVASAInfo TECHNICAL PAPER 11

12 Known Issues 1. In Starwind VVOLs Technical Preview, you cannot create new capability profiles. There is only one embedded preconfigured profile. 2. You cannot clone VM from local datastore to VVol Datastore. 3. You cannot do vmotion from one host to another of VM placed on VVol Datastore. 4. In case if you did not delete all VMs that were allocated on VVol Datastore before using the reset script, they can looks like active. But, after some time vcentre will refresh the information and your VMs will become inaccessible. TECHNICAL PAPER 12

13 Contacts US Headquarters EMEA and APAC (UK) (Germany) (France) (Russian Federation and CIS) Customer Support Portal: Support Forum: Sales: General Information: StarWind Software, Inc. 35 Village Rd., Suite 100, Middleton, MA USA , StarWind Software Inc. All rights reserved. TECHNICAL PAPER 13