VMware Deployment with Microsoft. StorSimple. Version: 1.0

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1 VMware Deployment with Microsoft StorSimple Version: 1.0

2 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 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.

3 Contents Summary... 4 Configuring StorSimple For High Availability... 5 Recommendations... 6 Solution Architecture... 7 VMWare ISCSI Storage Benefits with StorSimple... 8 Shared storage... 8 vsphere High Availability... 8 Storage DRS... 8 Storage Vmotion... 8 Vmotion... 8 Data Deduplication... 9 Backup of virtual machines Appendix A: VAAI Block Zeroing Full Copy Thin Provisioning/UNMAP Appendix B: Best Practices for Running VMware vsphere on iscsi... 11

4 Summary This document is intended to describe the benefits of using StorSimple with VMware 4

5 Configuring StorSimple For High Availability The StorSimple solution is designed with fully redundant components for high availability. The redundant design has no single point-of-failure in the data path, from the time the I/O leaves the host to the time the I/O is stored to disk on the StorSimple solution. The highly available architecture is achieved through a combination of redundant hardware and features, including the following: Power and cooling modules (PCMs) Controller modules Multiple network interfaces for each controller RAID-10 protection for both the SSD and HDD drives Multipath I/O for iscsi The below diagram shows the redundant hardware of the StorSimple controller and the redundant architecture of the Hybrid Cloud Storage (HCS) solution with Azure and StorSimple. 5

6 Network cabling for your device: Label A Description LAN with Internet access B Controller 0 C PCM 0 D Controller 1 E PCM 1 F, G Hosts 0-5 Network interfaces Recommendations When configuring the StorSimple solution it is recommended to implement the following best practices: Ensure the StorSimple solution is firmly mounted and secured on the rack Connect the power supply cables from both the power control modules. Connect each power supply cable to different power circuits in the data center. This will prevent loss of power in the event that a single power circuit fails Connect all network ports from each of the controllers to the respective network subnets. During the initial configuration of the StorSimple solution, designate at least one port for use with the management interface and at least two ports for use with the iscsi data interface. If eight network ports are not available, a fewer number could be used albeit at a lowered level of redundancy. Make sure the appropriate network interfaces are enabled When using multiple VLANs, disable iscsi for the management (MGMT) interface MPIO, for iscsi, should be installed and configured on the host to leverage the multiple data paths connected to the StorSimple solution. Each iscsi host should have more than one network interface card (NIC) and be connected to more than one network switch for physical data path redundancy. The appropriate MPIO policies (round robin, failover, etc.) should be selected based on the desired behavior across the multiple network paths. For information on configuring MPIO with the StorSimple solution, refer to 6

7 Solution Architecture 7

8 VMWare ISCSI Storage Benefits with StorSimple Shared storage StorSimple offers shared storage capabilities for VMware VSphere data store luns either for Virtual machines or sources libraries vsphere High Availability Storage DRS VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management offers the below benefits Provide highly available resources to your workloads. Balance workloads for optimal performance. Scale and manage computing resources without service disruption. With StorSimple shared storage capabilities, DRS can be utilized efficiently Storage Vmotion Storage VMotion a component of VMware vsphere that allows the live migration of a running virtual machine's (VM) file system from one storage system to another, with no downtime for the VM or service disruption for end users. Storage performance is an important consideration for virtualized workloads and with the introduction of VAAI VAAI integrate with the firmware of the storage to command the storage to perform data copy actions. Without VAAI data needs to be copied from the storage layer over the network to the hypervisor and back to the storage layer. This takes times and uses resources on the host. StorSimple natively supports VAAI and for more information about VAAI refer to appendix A Vmotion 8

9 VMware vsphere live migration allows you to move an entire running virtual machine from one physical server to another, without downtime. The virtual machine retains its network identity and connections, ensuring a seamless migration process. Transfer the virtual machine's active memory and precise execution state over a high-speed network, allowing the virtual machine to switch from running on the source vsphere host to the destination vsphere host. This entire process takes less than two seconds on a gigabit Ethernet network. Automatically optimize virtual machines within resource pools. Perform hardware maintenance without scheduling downtime or disrupting business operations. Move virtual machines away from failing or underperforming servers. Data Deduplication StorSimple offers data deduplication over different volume tiers Primary tiered to cloud Backup DR Archival storage *local only volumes does not have deduplication feature due to performance implications. 9

10 Backup of virtual machines As Storsimple snapshot manager is not virtual machines aware and will challenging to maintain application consistency within the virtual machines, a 3rd party solution that integrates with VMware virtualization platform is recommended in this case. Appendix A: VAAI VAAI, which was introduced by VMware in vsphere version 4.1, offloads data-intensive operations to storage systems with a goal of accelerating the performance of common virtual server management operations. Three primitives are supported: Block Zeroing, which speeds the initialization of virtual machines; Full Copy, which accelerates the cloning and movement of virtual machines; and Scalable Lock Management, which streamlines coordination during virtual server management operations. It also supports Thin Provisioning and UNMAP that helps reclaim the dead space. Virtual Infrastructure Integrator offload VM processes to the storage to improve performance, VM density and backup/restore operations, this is mainly will be useful in case of VM templates creation and management operations as production workload VMs are not supported workload on StorSimple tiered volumes. VAAI is only supported with tiered StorSimple volumes that are being created on the same container, cross StorSimple storage containers VAAI is not a supported scenario. Block Zeroing Thick Eager Zeroed Disk VM Creation VMs of different sizes of disks that are of Thick Eager Zeroed storage format were created with disabling hardware acceleration and then later with enabling hardware acceleration. the creation time was highly reduced while VAAI is enabled. VM Initialization Time VMs of different sizes of Thick Eager Zeroed Disks were initialized with hardware acceleration disabled and then later with enabled, the creation time was highly reduced while VAAI is enabled. 10

11 Full Copy VM Storage Migration Virtual Machines created of different sizes of Thick Eager Zeroed Disks on top of the VMFS volume built on top of StorSimple volume shared between the ESXi Servers are migrated between different storage locations. the storage migration time was highly reduced while VAAI is enabled. Thin Provisioning/UNMAP Dead Space Reclamation When VMFS deletes happen, the underlying storage is unaware of the space that is available to be reclaimed. VAAI provides the capability to reclaim such dead space on the underlying storage. Appendix B: Best Practices for Running VMware vsphere on iscsi 11