OPTIMIZING MICROSOFT EXCHANGE AND SHAREPOINT WITH EMC XTREMIO

Transcription

1 White Paper OPTIMIZING MICROSOFT EXCHANGE AND SHAREPOINT WITH EMC XTREMIO EMC XtremIO 4.0, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 All-flash array with optimized performance Constant snapshot creation without performance impact Inline data reduction with minimized storage footprint EMC Solutions Abstract This white paper describes an EMC infrastructure offering optimized storage performance for Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 on the EMC XtremIO 4.0 all-flash array featuring inline data reduction and no-impact snapshots. September 2015

2 Copyright 2015 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. The information in this publication is provided as is. EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. All trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. White Paper Part Number H

3 Table of contents Executive summary... 5 Business case... 5 Solution overview... 5 Key results... 5 Introduction... 6 Purpose... 6 Scope... 6 Audience... 6 Terminology... 6 Technology overview... 7 Overview... 7 EMC XtremIO XtremIO Management Server... 8 XtremIO inline data reduction... 8 XtremIO snapshots... 8 EMC PowerPath/VE VMware vsphere Microsoft Exchange Microsoft SharePoint Server Solution architecture and configuration Overview Solution architecture Hardware resource Software resource Solution consideration and design Overview XtremIO storage design SAN networking best practices VMware design and considerations Virtual machine configurations VMware vsphere networking best practices Multipathing configuration Application design and considerations Exchange Server SharePoint Server

4 Solution validation and test results Overview Purpose Notes on results Testing and validation tools Microsoft Exchange Jetstress Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Visual Studio Team System to generate custom workload VSTS test client and test mechanism Microsoft Exchange Load Generator XtremIO data reduction analysis tests SharePoint 2013 data reduction analysis Exchange 2010/2013 data reduction analysis Combined performance test Test scenarios Combined performance test results XtremIO system performance XtremIO snapshot test and analysis Test method Test scenarios Test procedure Baseline test results Snapshot performance test results Snapshot storage data reduction analysis Conclusion Summary Findings References EMC documentation VMware documentation Microsoft documentation Testing and validation tools

5 Executive summary Business case The storage that is consumed on IT infrastructures by Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint data is vast. When you combine the storage consumed by the primary copy of the data with redundant copies of the databases and content databases, content stored in 2007 would now require six times the amount of storage. This is due to changes to the Exchange database structure combined with the implementation of database availability groups (DAGs) and Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups to provide application service availability per Microsoft best practices for application uptime and availability goals. To combat the huge increase in , documents, and collaboration application data, customers must look to innovation and advances in technology. EMC offers an innovative storage platform for Exchange administrators and SharePoint administrators that addresses the data explosion and helps the move to solutions partially or completely hosted in the cloud. Solution overview The EMC XtremIO all-flash array has numerous attributes that help data reduction for Exchange and SharePoint data. The solution outlined in this white paper shows how to achieve data reduction in your environment and provides proof points for significant performance improvements. Customize the architectural design and best practices of this solution for your own organization. Key results The key results of this solution are: XtremIO is simple and quick to deploy with little storage tuning and service in a virtualized environment for Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and Microsoft SharePoint Server XtremIO provides significant I/O per second (IOPS) while maintaining response times close to sub-milliseconds. For a single EMC X-Brick building-block configuration, the solution can support: Exchange Server with more than 200,000 users (150- -message profile per user) SharePoint Server with about 100,000 Publishing Portal users with a 10 percent concurrency rate or with about 70,000 Document Management Portal users with a 10 percent concurrency rate XtremIO inline data reduction saves physical storage capacity for Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server databases while offering optimized performance. This solution provides high-performance data copies through XtremIO snapshot technology with very little storage impact and with close to zero performance impact on production databases. 5

6 Introduction Purpose This white paper describes the solution for Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 deployed in a virtualized VMware vsphere environment with an XtremIO storage array. The white paper validates the solution, which uses XtremIO to achieve optimum performance and low latency with multiple workloads for Exchange Server and SharePoint Server. It describes the benefits of XtremIO deduplication for Exchange Server and SharePoint Server environments. Scope Audience This white paper shows: Enhanced performance under multiple workloads of Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 provided by the XtremIO storage array Highly efficient deduplication for an Exchange Server and SharePoint Server environment Cost-effective data accessibility and instant creation of multiple database copies using XtremIO snapshots, with near-zero performance impact on production databases The primary audience for this white paper is database and system administrators, storage administrators, and system architects who are responsible for designing, creating, and maintaining Exchange and SharePoint farms, and who are interested in achieving higher database availability and protection. Readers of this white paper should have some familiarity with Exchange Server and SharePoint Server performance and XtremIO technology. Terminology Table 1 lists some of the terminology used in this white paper. Table 1. Terminology Term AlwaysOn Availability Group Database availability group Definition A SQL Server feature that provides high availability and disaster recovery for SQL Server databases. An availability group supports a set of read/write primary databases and up to eight sets of corresponding secondary databases. The secondary databases can be made available for readonly access or some backup operations. A group of Exchange mailbox servers that hosts a set of databases and provides automatic database-level recovery from failures that affect individual servers or databases. 6

7 Technology overview Overview EMC XtremIO 4.0 The key technology components used in this solution are: EMC XtremIO 4.0 EMC PowerPath /VE 6.0 VMware vsphere 6.0 Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 The XtremIO storage array is an all-flash system based on a scale-out architecture. The system uses X-Brick building blocks, which can be clustered together, as shown in Figure 1 to grow performance and capacity as required. Figure 1. EMC XtremIO configuration for multiple X-Brick clusters The XtremIO array architecture is specifically designed to deliver the full performance potential of flash while linearly scaling all resources such as CPU, RAM, solid-state drives (SSDs), and host ports in a balanced way. This enables the array to achieve any wanted performance level while maintaining consistency of performance that is critical to predictable application behavior. 7

8 With clusters of two or more X-Brick building blocks, XtremIO uses a redundant 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand network for back-end connectivity between the storage controllers, ensuring a highly available, ultra-low latency network. The InfiniBand network is a fully managed component of the XtremIO array, and administrators of XtremIO arrays do not need specialized skills in InfiniBand technology. XtremIO Management Server XtremIO Management Server (XMS) is a standalone, dedicated Linux-based server that is preinstalled with the CLI and GUI and is used to control the XtremIO system operation. XMS can be either a physical or a virtual server. The array continues operating if it is disconnected from XMS but cannot be configured or monitored. XtremIO inline data reduction XtremIO inline data reduction is achieved by using inline data deduplication and inline data compression. Data deduplication and data compression complement each other. Data deduplication removes redundancies from data before it is written to the flash media. Data compression compresses the already-deduplicated data before it is written to the flash media. Because XtremIO is also a fully thin-provisioned storage system, more storage savings are realized for overall efficiency. XtremIO snapshots XtremIO snapshots are created by capturing the state of data in volumes at a particular point in time and allowing users to access that data when needed, even when the source volume has changed. Snapshots can be accessed like any other volume in the cluster in read/write access mode. Users can choose to mount the snapshot in read-only mode from the host to maintain consistency. When a new write arrives, XtremIO updates the new data using redirect-on-write method to write to a new location, and only metadata is updated to point to the new data location. XtremIO snapshots can be used in a number of use cases, including logical corruption protection, backups, development and testing, clones, offline processing from the production server, and so on. For more information about XtremIO, see the Introduction to the EMC XtremIO Storage Array (Ver. 4.0) White Paper. 8

9 EMC PowerPath/VE 6.0 EMC PowerPath/VE 6.0 provides intelligent, high-performance path management with path failover and load balancing optimized for EMC and selected third-party storage systems. PowerPath/VE 6.0 redistributes the I/O load across multiple paths between the vsphere host and an external storage device to perform load balancing. PowerPath/VE fully supports the VMware vsphere 6.0 virtualization platform. PowerPath/VE works with the VMware ESXi physical server as a multipath plug-in (MPP) that provides path management to hosts. The MPP is installed as a kernel module on the vsphere host. It plugs into the vsphere I/O stack framework to bring the advanced multipathing capabilities of PowerPath/VE, including dynamic load balancing and automatic failover, to the vsphere hosts. VMware vsphere 6.0 VMware vsphere 6.0 is a virtualization platform that empowers users to virtualize any application, redefines availability, and also simplifies the virtual data center. An ideal foundation for any cloud environment, vsphere ensures a highly available, resilient, and on-demand infrastructure for any computing, networking, and storage resources. vsphere 6.0 features the following key scalability and performance enhancements, which enable a virtual machine to use more resources from the hypervisor: Support for vsphere clusters to scale to up 64 hosts and 8,000 virtual machines in a single cluster Support for 480 logical CPUs, 12 TB of RAM, and 1,024 virtual machines in each Hypervisor 6.0 instance Virtual machine hardware version 11, which provides up to 128 vcpus and 4 TB of RAM Expanded support for the latest x86 chip sets, devices, drivers, and guest operating systems Virtual Volumes feature that enables your external storage arrays to become virtual machine-aware Support for non-disruptive live migration of workloads across virtual switches and vcenter Servers Expanded support for software-based fault tolerance for workloads with up to four vcpus Support for the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter with virtual machines running Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) Microsoft Exchange 2013 Microsoft Exchange 2013 is an enterprise and communication system that enables businesses and customers to collaborate and share information. EMC enhances Exchange 2013 with a selection of storage platforms, software, and services. Exchange 2013 builds on the Exchange 2010 architecture and was redesigned to simplify scale, hardware utilization, and failure isolation. 9

10 Exchange 2013 uses database availability groups (DAGs) and mailbox database copies, along with other features such as single-item recovery, retention policies, and lagged-database copies, to provide high availability, site resilience, and Exchange native data protection. The high availability platform, the Exchange Information Store, and the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) have all been enhanced to provide greater availability and easier management, and to reduce costs. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 provides a business-collaboration platform for enterprise and commercial organizations. SharePoint enables organizations to share content and information through websites, blogs, wikis, and document libraries, and to manage this content and information collectively from start to finish. SharePoint 2013 sites provide secure environments that enable administrators to configure and provide personalized access to documents and other information. The search features also enable users to find content efficiently regardless of the physical location of data. This solution fully supports SharePoint Server 2013 with Service Pack 1 running on a Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 environment. 10

11 Solution architecture and configuration Overview Solution architecture This section describes a validated reference architecture that provides an optimal cost-performance for enterprise-class Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint application in a virtualized VMware environment on EMC XtremIO storage array consisting of a single X-Brick building block. Figure 2 shows the reference architecture of this solution. Figure 2. Solution reference architecture This solution includes the following components: XtremIO 4.0 single X-Brick all-flash array as back-end storage, which provides extreme performance and scalability for messaging collaboration application use cases Two redundant Fibre Channel (FC) switches for the storage area network (SAN) connection between the ESXi hosts and the storage array 11

12 Two redundant IP switches for the ESXi hosts and virtual machines interconnection vsphere 6.0 hosts with VMware vsphere High Availability (vsphere HA) cluster enabled, which provides high availability and easy provisioning for computing, networking resources used by SharePoint and Exchange virtual machines Exchange Server 2013 with DAG enabled for high availability SharePoint Server 2013 with Microsoft SQL Server 2014 AlwaysOn Availability Group enabled for both content and service databases protection Hardware resource Table 2 lists the hardware components used in this solution. Table 2. Hardware resources Computer hardware Quantity Configuration Description EMC XtremIO 1 A single 10 TB X-Brick 25 * 400 GB SSD, 7.58 TB physical capacity in total Storage array VMware vsphere ESXi 4 48 physical cores and 96 logical processors 512 GB memory Server FC switch 2 8 Gb/s FC SAN connection between servers and storage array Ethernet switch 2 10 GbE/s IP connection between servers Software resource Table 3 lists the software components used in this solution. Table 3. Software resources Software Version Description EMC XtremIO 4.0 Storage array EMC PowerPath/VE 6.0 Multipathing and load balancing with I/O path optimization VMware vsphere ESXi 6.0 Hypervisor VMware vcenter Server 6.0 vsphere management server Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Enterprise SP1 Enterprise messaging system Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise SP1 Enterprise collaboration system Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise SP1 Enterprise database system Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Data Center Operating system 12

13 Solution consideration and design Overview This section describes the XtremIO storage design and host SAN networking configuration used in this solution. You must understand the design considerations, including host connectivity for the XtremIO storage array, to ensure the best availability and performance for your hosts. This section also describes virtual design and configuration for the vsphere platform, and application considerations for Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server EMC recommends that you check the latest host configuration guide for XtremIO and vsphere design considerations before building your environment. XtremIO storage design XtremIO uses a highly available back-end InfiniBand network that provides high speeds with ultra-low latency and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) between all storage controllers in the cluster. By using RDMA, the XtremIO system is essentially a single, shared memory space spanning all storage controllers, therefore performance is always consistent and predictable and never offloaded. Storage configuration, random or sequential patterns, or heavy metadata operations such as inline data reduction are conducted entirely in memory and do not impact the I/O. With XtremIO Data Protection, XtremIO requires less reserved capacity for data protection, metadata storage, snapshots, spare drives, and performance, which leaves more space for user data. For this solution, XtremIO is deployed in a single X-Brick cluster configured with GB SSDs (including two hot spares), which provides a physical capacity of 7.58 TB, as shown in Figure 3. Figure 3. EMC XtremIO storage capacity 13

14 We set up the volume sizes for this solution, as shown in Table 4. XtremIO uses thin provisioning to avoid wasting physical storage and to provide growth capacity for future business requirements. Table 4. Storage design for Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 Volume name Description Volume number Volume capacity ContentDB_Pri ContentDB_Sec Service Microsoft SharePoint content database volume Microsoft SharePoint content database replication volume Microsoft SharePoint application service database/index volume TB TB TB Exchange_Vol Exchange database volume TB SAN networking best practices EMC recommends the following SAN network best practices: Use multiple HBAs on the servers and at least two SAN switches to provide redundant paths between the servers and the XtremIO cluster. To avoid multipathing performance degradation, do not use more than 16 paths per storage device. Use 8 Gb/s FC switches and HBA ports. Use a single-target-per-single-initiator (1:1) zoning scheme. In a single X-Brick configuration, a host may have up to four paths per device. Figure 4 shows the logical connection topology for four paths. Each XtremIO storage controller (SC) has two FC paths that connect to the physical host through redundant SAN switches. Figure 4. XtremIO single X-Brick FC connection 14

15 VMware design and considerations With the enhanced virtual machine compatibility, we deployed virtualized environment for both Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 on the vsphere platform. Virtual machine configurations We deployed four ESXi 6.0 servers and set up the vsphere cluster to provide high availability and protection for all Exchange Server and SharePoint Server virtual machines. Table 5 lists the virtual machine configuration designed for this solution. Note: For each virtual machine, we set the boot disk size to 100 GB. Table 5. Virtual machine configurations Virtual machine role Exchange Mailbox and Client Access roles combined SharePoint - Web servers SharePoint Application Server (with Crawler) SharePoint Application Server (with Query and other services) Qty vcpu Memory (GB) Application data - VMDK configuration VMware Datastore XtremIO volume TB * 4 Database file Exchange_DS Exchange_Vol 100 GB * 4 Database log file Not applicable Not applicable Not applicable GB Temp Index file SPS_Service_DS Service GB Index file SPS_Service_DS Service SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group (Primary/ Secondary) TB Content 1.2 TB database datafile 600 GB 400 GB SPS_Content_Pri _DS, SPS_Content_Se c_ds ContentDB_PRI, ContentDB_Sec 300 GB 1.2 TB Database log file SPS_Service_DS Service 500 GB Service application database datafile Note: EMC recommends that you calculate the compute and storage resources for both Exchange Server and SharePoint Server based on user requirements. 15

16 For more information about storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration for SharePoint Server 2013, see the Microsoft TechNet topic Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server 2013). For more requirements and recommendations about Exchange 2013 virtualization, see the Microsoft TechNet topic Exchange 2013 Virtualization. VMware vsphere networking best practices For best performance and high availability, we created two standard virtual switches for each ESXi host: vswitch0: Created with a 1 GbE adapter for management network vswitch1: Created with a 10 GbE adapter for Exchange and SharePoint virtual machine connectivity To ensure optimal performance and stability, EMC recommends selecting VMXNET3 as the virtual network adapter type when configuring each virtual machine. For more information, refer to the vsphere Networking Guide: vsphere 6.0, ESXi 6.0, vcenter Server 6.0. Multipathing configuration EMC recommends that you use PowerPath/VE software to provide multipathing for the ESXi hosts. We used PowerPath/VE 6.0 to implement optimized load balancing and intelligent path management for the Exchange and SharePoint servers, which fully supports the XtremIO all-flash storage. Figure 5 shows the XtremIO volume managed by PowerPath/VE on an ESXi host. Figure 5. XtremIO volume management with PowerPath/VE 16

17 For more information about PowerPath/VE installation and management, refer to the PowerPath/VE for VMware vsphere 6.0 Installation and Administration Guide. Application design and considerations The solution is designed for typical messaging collaboration applications, including Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server Exchange Server 2013 We deployed Exchange Server 2013 combined roles on each of the Exchange servers. Multirole servers provide efficient use of server resources by distributing the client access and mailbox resources across a pool of servers. To provide high availability to Exchange databases, we also configured the Exchange 2013 database availability group (DAG) feature in the environment. Database availability group design We used the Exchange Server 2013 DAG feature to provide high availability for the Exchange Server databases. We configured each mailbox server with four databases: two active and two passive. All databases were balanced and distributed between mailbox servers within the DAG and between the ESXi nodes to eliminate a single point of failure. Figure 6 shows the DAG database distribution. Figure 6. DAG database distribution SharePoint Server 2013 The SharePoint farm is designed for optimized performance, ease of manageability, and growth. SharePoint Server 2013 server role design To meet the enterprise-class user counts and requirements on XtremIO, and to provide high availability for both SharePoint system and user databases, we deployed ten SharePoint servers in several different roles: Four SharePoint web servers with load balancing to handle web requests Four SharePoint application servers with two crawl servers and two query servers to improve crawl and query performance Two SQL Server 2014 servers to service all content and service databases using the AlwaysOn Availability Group feature to provide high availability 17

18 Database server configuration for SharePoint Server 2013 We enabled the SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group feature to provide databaselevel high availability for both SharePoint content databases and service application databases. The two SQL Server 2014 virtual machines in the SharePoint farm are deployed in a WSFC cluster, which is fully supported on the vsphere 6.0 platform. When you enable AlwaysOn Availability Group on the SharePoint databases, EMC recommends the following: Before deploying AlwaysOn Availability Group, confirm which SharePoint database this SQL Server feature can protect. For more information, refer to the Microsoft TechNet topic Supported high availability and disaster recovery options for SharePoint databases (SharePoint 2013). If AlwaysOn Availability Group is needed for both content databases and service application databases for SharePoint, set up two separate AlwaysOn Availability Groups for isolation and easy management of the two database types. Databases that are built with AlwaysOn Availability Group require that the recovery mode is set to FULL. Allocate sufficient space for the log volume, and back up logs frequently to prevent database failure. For more information about optimizing SQL Server for SharePoint, refer to the Microsoft TechNet topic Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server 2013). 18

19 Solution validation and test results Overview This section validates the performance of Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 in a virtualized environment on the XtremIO storage array with combined workloads. This section describes how we implemented snapshots using the XtremIO snapshot feature, and validated the performance impact during snapshot creation. We also observed the data reduction resulting from using deduplication and snapshots on the Exchange and SharePoint Server databases. Table 6 provides a high-level overview of the tests used to validate this solution. Table 6. Tests Test group XtremIO data reduction analysis tests Combined performance tests Test SharePoint 2013 data reduction analysis Exchange 2010/2013 data reduction analysis Exchange Jetstress test combined with the SharePoint Publishing Portal test Exchange Jetstress test combined with the SharePoint Document Management Portal test XtremIO snapshot test and analysis Snapshot performance impact test with Exchange LoadGen and SharePoint Document Management Portal Data reduction benefits analysis of XtremIO snapshot Purpose The purpose of the performance tests was not to showcase the raw performance limit of XtremIO, but to show how enterprise workloads can be easily serviced by XtremIO while keeping a sustainable lower latency. Notes on results Benchmark results are highly dependent on workload, specific application requirements, and system design and implementation. Relative system performance will vary as a result of these and other factors. Do not use this workload as a substitute for a specific customer application benchmark when contemplating critical capacity planning or product evaluation decisions. All performance data contained in this report was obtained in a rigorously controlled environment. Results obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. EMC Corporation does not warrant or represent that a user can or will achieve similar performance. 19

20 Testing and validation tools Microsoft Exchange Jetstress 2013 Verify the Exchange 2013 storage design for expected transactional IOPS before placing it in a production environment. To ensure that the environment functions appropriately, EMC recommends that you use the Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress 2013 tool for the verification. Jetstress simulated Exchange I/O at the database level by interacting directly with the extensible storage engine database technology without having Exchange installed. To simulate the Exchange I/O accurately, Jetstress used the same ese.dll file that Exchange uses in production. You can configure Jetstress to test the maximum I/O throughput available to the disk subsystem within the required performance constraints of Exchange. Jetstress can accept a simulated profile of specific user counts and IOPS per user to verify that all the hardware and software components within the I/O stack, from the OS down to the physical disk drive, can maintain an acceptable performance level. You can download Jetstress 2013 at Microsoft Exchange Server Jetstress 2013 Tool. Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Visual Studio Team System to generate custom workload To provide a realistic document archive scenario, document uniqueness was critical. We used two separate utilities the first to create unique documents, and the second to read these files from disk and load them directly into targeted SharePoint web applications and document libraries. Bulk Loader tool to create large numbers of documents We created documents using the Bulk Loader command-line tool, which was written using the Microsoft.NET 4.0 Framework. This tool uses a dump file of Wikipedia content as input to create up to ten million unique documents to a disk location. Stock images are used to replace image references from the Wikipedia dumps. This tool is available as source code at: Bulk Loader - Create Unique Documents based on Wikipedia Dump File. LoadBulk2SP tool to load documents into SharePoint We added documents to SharePoint Server using the LoadBulk2SP command-line tool, which was written using C# and the Microsoft.NET 3.5 Framework to be compatible with SharePoint Server. This tool takes the disk output files from the Bulk Loader tool as input and mimics the same folder and file structure directly into SharePoint Server. It uses the targeted web applications and document libraries specified in the application configuration. Using this tool, we loaded over 100 million 250 KB documents into SharePoint Server with a peak performance of 233 documents per second, and an overall average load rate of 137 documents per second. This tool is available as source code at: Load Bulk Content to SharePoint VSTS test client and test mechanism We used Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) with custom code developed by EMC to simulate the SharePoint load, and built up the test environment with the VSTS team test tool that consists of a single controller and eight agents. 20

21 Microsoft Exchange Load Generator While the Jetstress tool is used for verifying the Exchange storage design, Microsoft Exchange Load Generator (LoadGen) is a simulation tool used to measure the impact of various client workloads on Exchange Server We used this tool to verify the impact of taking snapshots of the entire Exchange environment. LoadGen enables us to test how the infrastructure, including Exchange services, CPU, memory, and other resources, performs under close-to-production user load. These tests send multiple messaging requests to the Exchange Server, which causes a mail load and helps to determine if each of the Exchange servers can handle the load they are intended to carry. LoadGen requires a full deployment of the Exchange environment for validation testing. Customers should perform all LoadGen validation testing in an isolated lab environment where there is no connectivity to production data. To get a copy of the LoadGen tool, go to Exchange Load Generator 2013 at the Microsoft Download Center. XtremIO data reduction analysis tests SharePoint 2013 data reduction analysis We observed the data reduction on the Microsoft SharePoint 2013 databases that can be directly attributed to XtremIO. Test method With data reduction, XtremIO system capacity can be expanded beyond the physical capacity. With the large amount of deduplication data, we can also provide a logical capacity that exceeds the physical flash capacity in the storage system. In this test, we created about 19.5 TB volumes on XtremIO for the SharePoint databases. The data deduplication was kept to a ratio of 1.9:1, which was highly dependent on the SharePoint database data. The compression ratio was approximately 1.1:1, as shown in Figure 7. 21

22 Figure 7. SharePoint Server data reduction ratio Test results The overall data reduction ratio in this SharePoint environment showed that the effective volume and physical storage ratio was about 2.2:1. This means that 5.13 TB was the eventual amount of physical capacity we fit into the storage for SharePoint data. You normally need more than 11 TB of storage for SharePoint content databases and service application databases. However, with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group enabled, we only needed about 5.13 TB of physical storage capacity on the array. You can also allocate a 19.5 TB volume for growth when you create the LUNs. Exchange 2010/2013 data reduction analysis EMC published the EMC XtremIO and Microsoft Exchange Databases Reference Architecture Guide, which showcases the Exchange 2010/2013 data reduction on XtremIO with EMC IT real environment data. The reference architecture guide: Describes the solution that EMC has developed to show the efficiency and benefits of storing Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013 mailbox databases on XtremIO Shows efficiency rates ranging from 2.5:1 to more than 8:1 on XtremIO, which many customers, including EMC IT, have tested and evaluated. 22

23 Showcases an average reduction of 60 percent in actual storage usage for the active copy in the majority of installations Combined performance test We validated the feasibility and performance of the XtremIO all-flash array on service enterprise messaging collaboration application workloads, including Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint 2013, on the vsphere 6.0 virtualization platform. The application-level HA feature was enabled. In this combined performance test, we used the following tools to simulate client workload for both Exchange Server and SharePoint Server: Jetstress 2013 VSTS to generate custom workload We considered two typical SharePoint user profiles to validate performance: Publishing Portal: A starter-site hierarchy that can be used for an internet site or a large intranet portal. The site includes a home page, a sample press release site, a search center, and a login page. Typically, this site has many more readers than contributors, and it uses approval workflows to publish the web pages. Document Management Portal: A site on which you can centrally manage and collaborate on documents in your enterprise. Test scenarios We validated typical messaging collaboration user profiles for Exchange and SharePoint using the following tests: Exchange Jetstress test combined with the SharePoint Publishing Portal test Exchange Jetstress test combined with the SharePoint Document Management Portal test We conducted both combined tests for two hours, collected and measured the performance counters, and generated test reports. Exchange Jetstress test profile Jetstress simulated over 200,000 active users on four mailbox servers to validate the performance under the worst (failover) situation, with all active databases evenly distributed on the four mailbox servers. Table 7 shows the user profile for Jetstress in this test. Table 7. User profile for Exchange Jetstress tests Item Number of Exchange 2013 mailboxes per Exchange Mailbox server Mailbox profile (in DAG configuration) Database read/write ratio Value 200, messages/user/day (0.101 IOPS) 3:2 in a DAG configuration 23

24 Item Number of servers per DAG 4 Value Number of databases per Exchange Mailbox server Background database maintenance 4 active databases Enabled SharePoint test profiles We ran the test with a full user load in a goal-based test pattern, which sent user requests to push the web-server processor utilization to the target range. We used a common mix of user profiles to emulate different types of business organizations. For a systematic background workload, we scheduled an incremental crawl every 30 minutes to ensure the index was up to date and the query results were accurate. Table 8 shows the two user profiles used in the test. Table 8. User profiles for SharePoint tests Profile characteristics Quantity/Type/Size Publishing Portal Total user count Up to 90,000 User profile (%browse/%search/%modify) 80/10/10 User concurrency rate 10% Document Management Portal Total user count Up to 50,000 User profile 50/20/20/10 (%browse/%search/%modify/%upload) User concurrency rate 10% Total content database size 4 TB in total (2 TB/1 TB/500 GB/300 GB/200 GB) Total site collection count 20 Sites per site collection 10 Document size range 10 KB 10 MB (320 KB average) Combined performance test results The combined performance test validated both the total passed tests per second on the production SharePoint 2013 farm and the IOPS generated by the Jetstress tool. Exchange Jetstress test combined with the SharePoint Publishing Portal test Table 9 and Table 10 list the test results for Jetstress and SharePoint Publishing Portal combined workload on XtremIO. For Jetstress, we achieved 21,663 IOPS while maintaining the response time at submillisecond level. We kept both the database-read latency and log-write latency at about 1 ms from the host side. This response time was greatly improved compared to the traditional storage target of 20 ms. 24

25 Table 9. Jetstress test results Jetstress key metric Target Test result Achieved transactional IOPS (I/O database reads/sec + I/O database writes/sec) 20,000 21,663 I/O database reads average latency (ms) I/O log writes average latency (ms) Less than 20 ms Less than 10 ms ms ms For SharePoint, from Table 10, we set the web-server processor utilization below 70 percent as our goal-based test target. We achieved over 160 RPS and kept the test time within the target range. This result indicates that XtremIO can support 96,120 SharePoint Publishing Portal users with a 10 percent concurrency rate. The average response time for browse was only 0.49 seconds. For search and modify, the average response time was 1.32 and 1.29 seconds respectively. With the incremental crawl running every 30 minutes, the test time for these typical user behaviors was kept at a very low level, which guarantees a good user experience when performing web-service operations. The processor utilization for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group primary and secondary instances was below 50 percent, which is within the Green Zone range. Table 10. SharePoint Publishing Portal test results SharePoint key metric Target Test results Total passed tests/second 90,000 users with 10% Maximum user capacity concurrency rate 96,120 Transferred user concurrency rate 10% Browse average test time < 3 seconds 0.46 seconds Search average test time < 3 seconds 1.32 seconds Modify average test time < 3 seconds 1.29 seconds Average Web Server Processor % Average SQL Server Processor % (AlwaysOn Availability Group Primary/Secondary) < 70% 68.7%/69.8%/67.1%/67.4% < 50% 43.2%/1.6% The test results show that an XtremIO storage array with a single X-Brick can easily support over 200,000 Exchange users with a messages profile featuring IOPS per user. XtremIO can also service over 96,000 SharePoint publishing portal users with a 10 percent concurrency rate. 25

26 Exchange Jetstress and SharePoint Document Management Portal test Table 11 and Table 12 list the test results for the Jetstress and SharePoint Document Management Portal combined workload on XtremIO. For Jetstress, we achieved 21,422 IOPS and a sub-millisecond response time for all mailboxes. Table 11. Jetstress test results Jetstress key metric Target Test result Achieved transactional IOPS (I/O database reads/sec + I/O database writes/sec) 20,000 21,422 I/O database reads average latency (ms) I/O log writes average latency (ms) Less than 20 ms Less than 10 ms ms ms For SharePoint, from Table 12, with the Document Management Portal user profile, we achieved over 110 RPS with a mixed browse/search/modify/upload set to 50/20/20/10 percent. This result indicates that XtremIO can support up to 66,240 SharePoint Document Management Portal users with a 10 percent concurrency rate. Even with a 30-minute background job to perform incremental crawling, the overall test time for browse was only 0.27 seconds. Document management operations such as modify and upload were completed within 1 second, with search operations completed in slightly over 1 second. These results show very fast user experiences when using XtremIO. Table 12. SharePoint Document Management Portal test results SharePoint key metric Target Test results Total passed tests/second > 50,000 users with 10% Maximum user capacity concurrency rate 66,240 Transferred user concurrency rate 10% Browse average test time < 3 seconds 0.27 seconds Search average test time < 3 seconds 1.09 seconds Modify average test time < 3 seconds 0.96 seconds Upload average test time < 3 seconds 0.68 seconds Average Web Server Processor % < 70% 66.3%/66.6%/67.5%/66.2% 26

27 SharePoint key metric Target Test results Average SQL Server Processor % (AlwaysOn Availability Group Primary/Secondary) < 50% 44.6%/1.45% The test results show that an XtremIO single X-Brick storage array can easily support over 210,000 Exchange users with a messages profile featuring IOPS per user. XtremIO can also service over 66,000 SharePoint Document Management Portal users with a 10 percent concurrency rate. XtremIO system performance When we ran the Jetstress workload on a system combined with both SharePoint portals, XtremIO provided IOPS with an extremely low latency, as shown in Figure 8 and Figure 9. Figure 8. Real-time latency in XtremIO with Exchange and SharePoint workload Figure 9 shows the latency results of running both Exchange and SharePoint workloads on XtremIO. With the enterprise-class all-flash array, the storage latency was kept to around 600 µs. There were several spikes on the array due to a background job of SharePoint incremental crawling operations. However, the spikes reach only 1.2 ms, while for a traditional storage array, this spike might increase beyond 100 µs. 27

28 Figure 9. Average latency in XtremIO with Exchange and SharePoint workload XtremIO snapshot test and analysis We validated and measured the performance impact of XtremIO snapshots against both Exchange and SharePoint workloads. Then we calculated the overall efficiency provided by the snapshot feature. We further analyzed any subsequent data reduction benefits. Test method In the XtremIO snapshot test, we used LoadGen 2013 to simulate the Exchange workload, and used VSTS to generate the SharePoint user workload. We used the SharePoint Document Management Portal as the user profile in this snapshot test. Test scenarios We validated the following: Performance impact of XtremIO snapshot on an Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013 workload Data reduction benefits analysis of XtremIO snapshot for Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013 Exchange LoadGen test profile We used LoadGen to simulate an Exchange system. Before we used this tool, we set up and configured the Exchange Server 2013 SP1 system. We configured four databases in each mailbox server: two active and two passive. All databases were balanced and distributed between mailbox servers within the DAG and between the ESXi nodes to eliminate a single point of failure. We ran a full workload generated by LoadGen during the snapshot test. Table 13 shows the Exchange user profile for the LoadGen test. 28

29 Table 13. User profile for LoadGen test Item Mailbox profile (in DAG configuration) Target average message size Database read/write ratio Deleted items retention (DIR) period Number of servers per DAG 8 Number of databases per Exchange Mailbox server 4 Value 150 messages/user/day (0.101 IOPS) 75 KB 3:2 in a DAG configuration 14 days SharePoint VSTS test profile For simplicity, we selected the SharePoint Document Management Portal user profile for the snapshot test, with a 2 TB content-database size. We ran the test with a full user load in a goal-based test pattern, and used the VSTS tool to send user requests to push the web-server processor utilization to the target range. We maintained a background schedule for a SharePoint incremental crawl every 30 seconds to update the index and ensure an accurate query. Table 14 shows the SharePoint user profile used for the VSTS test. Table 14. User profile for SharePoint VSTS test Profile characteristics Document Management Portal Quantity/Type/Size Total user count Up to 50,000 User profile (%browse/%search/ %modify/%upload) User concurrency rate 10% 50%/20%/20%/10% Total content database size 2 TB in total (1 TB/500 GB/300 GB/200 GB) Total site collection count 10 Sites per site collection 10 Document size range 10 KB 10 MB (average, 315 KB) Test procedure We performed a standard baseline test with LoadGen and SharePoint Document Management Portal, and then we scheduled five hourly jobs in XMS to create snapshots against Exchange and SharePoint database volumes on XtremIO. Workload was applied throughout the test. We measured both the performance impact and data reduction benefits. To do the snapshot test, we: 1. Created one snapshot consistency group for the Exchange volumes and another for the SharePoint content and service application databases. 2. Generated a workload for Exchange using LoadGen. 3. Generated a workload for the SharePoint Document Management Portal with browse/search/modify/upload set to 50%/20%/20%/10%. 29

30 4. Performed the baseline test for LoadGen and SharePoint with test duration set to 10 hours. 5. Measured and collected the performance counters for both applications. 6. Generated the same workload in the baseline test. 7. Scheduled a snapshot job to create five hourly writable snapshots against both the Exchange and SharePoint consistency group. Ran the test for another 10 hours. 8. Measured and collected performance and data reduction information every hour. Baseline test results We generated the workload simultaneously for Exchange Server and SharePoint Server, and we set the test duration to 10 hours for the baseline test results. We monitored and measured the performance metrics. Table 15 shows the LoadGen baseline test results, which were better than those targeted for a traditional storage array. We kept the read/write latency for both active and passive databases around 1 ms. Table 15. LoadGen baseline test results Server Performance counter Target Test result Exchange Mailbox and Client Access combined server roles Memory\ %Committed Bytes In Use < 80% 48.1% Processor\ %Processor Time < 75% 28.7% MSExchange RpcclientAccess\RPC Requests < 40 ms 0.47 ms MSExchange RpcclientAccess\RPC Averaged Latency MSExchange Database\I/O Database Reads (Attached) Average Latency MSExchange Database\I/O Database Writes (Attached) Average Latency MSExchange Database\I/O Database Reads (Recovery) Average Latency MSExchange Database\I/O Database Writes (Recovery) Average Latency MSExchange Database\I/O Log Writes Average Latency < 250 ms 4.1 ms < 20 ms 1.43 ms < 20 ms 1.37 ms < 20 ms 0.71 ms < 20 ms 1.3 ms < 10 ms 1.05 ms Table 16 shows the SharePoint baseline test results for the snapshot test with the Document Management Portal user profile. With the goal-based test pattern, we pushed the processor time of each web server to about 70 percent. We achieved 96.1 RPS in the baseline test, and kept all the response times for each SharePoint user operation within 1 second. 30

31 Table 16. SharePoint baseline test results Key metric Target Test result Total passed tests/sec > 50,000 users with 96.1 Maximum user capacity 10% concurrency rate 57,660 Transferred user concurrency rate 10% Browse average test time < 3 seconds 0.22 seconds Search average test time < 3 seconds 0.93 seconds Modify average test time < 3 seconds 0.89 seconds Upload average test time < 3 seconds 0.60 seconds Average Web Server Processor % < 70% 67.4%/69.3%/65.7%/68.3% Average SQL Server Processor % (AlwaysOn AG Primary/Secondary) < 50% 45.0%/1.88% Snapshot performance test results For the snapshot test, we scheduled an hourly job in the XMS management console to perform snapshot creation on the LoadGen and SharePoint database volumes. We created five snapshots in total and monitored the performance impact before and after. During the test, we applied the LoadGen workload against all mailboxes and performed the Document Management Portal test using SharePoint VSTS. Figure 10 shows the snapshot test results. We achieved 96.1 RPS for SharePoint user workload. After the first snapshot was created, we measured the performance every hour. 31

32 Figure 10. Snapshot performance test results Because the SharePoint workloads continued to be applied, new writes were redirected to a new location using a redirect-on-write method, which increased the XtremIO physical capacity. We measured the performance impact during the workload application for 10 hours. The performance for SharePoint was very stable, RPS results were maintained at about 96 in the five snapshot periods. After the five snapshots were created, the RPS result was 95.6 for the remaining five hours, with almost no changes. Table 17 shows the comparison of the LoadGen test results before and after the snapshot creation. We already achieved an excellent result for the baseline test, which is better than the defined target. After the five snapshots were created, the performance was very stable and remained at the same level as the baseline test results. Table 17. Comparison of test results for snapshot creation Server Performance counter Baseline Exchange Mailbox and Client Access combined server roles With snapshots Memory\ %Committed Bytes In Use 48.1% 48.3% Processor\ %Processor Time 28.7% 29.0% MSExchange RpcclientAccess\RPC Requests MSExchange RpcclientAccess\RPC Averaged Latency MSExchange Database\I/O Database Reads (Attached) Average Latency