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07-01-2008 Benefits of iSCSI with Virtualization
Combining the server virtualization and iSCSI storage creates many benefits with a very flexible platform that is easily setup and expanded as needed. This web chat will focus on using iSCSI with virtualization and the ways that it is beneficial.
iSCSI: Superior Storage for Virtualization - Dell Whitepaper
iSCSI and VMware
iSCSI on DellTechCenter
Dell EqualLogic - Travis Vigil and Marc Farley - WebChat from 2-4-08
VMware and iSCSI Discussion - Todd Muirhead and Travis Vigil - WebChat from 3-11-08
Technical Community - Background Reading
iSCSI: Superior Storage for Virtualization - Dell Whitepaper
iSCSI and VMware
iSCSI on DellTechCenter
Dell EqualLogic - Travis Vigil and Marc Farley - WebChat from 2-4-08
VMware and iSCSI Discussion - Todd Muirhead and Travis Vigil - WebChat from 3-11-08
Chat Transcript
| DELL-ToddM joined. | ||
| Adam_McCurdy joined. | ||
| DELL-ToddM | Hello Adam | |
| Adam_McCurdy | Howdy. | |
| Adam_McCurdy | I'm actually a Dell Employee over in Powerconnect support -- I was just told about this by Jason Groce, one of our training developers. Figured I'd check it out and see if anything was happening. | |
| DELL-ToddM | Cool - We welcome all | |
| DELL-ToddM | I am expecting a couple of more Dell iscsi guys to show up as well | |
| DELL-ToddM | Do you have to deal with iscsi very much in Powerconnect support? | |
| Adam_McCurdy | A bit. We've got a few switches that are "iscsi optimized." | |
| Adam_McCurdy | The 54xx series. | |
| DELL-ToddM | We got a few of the iscsi optimizied switches in our lab for our iscsi network as well | |
| DELL-ToddM | Waiting for people to join the chat | |
| DELL-ScottH joined. | ||
| DELL-ToddM | Hello Scott | |
| DELL-ScottH | hey Todd, had a meeting just before this... hey Adam ! | |
| DELL-ToddM | I was beginning to think that you were caught in a Tf2 session | |
| DELL-ScottH | man down man down !! .. medic ! | |
| DELL-ToddM | Adam works in Powerconnect support | |
| DELL-ToddM | Adam - Where are you located? | |
| DELL-ToddM | I am in Rr5 | |
| ramseyg_dell joined. | ||
| DELL-ScottH | cool, I'm thinking about duct taping 10 Gbit links together to get 10gb, will that work :-) | |
| DELL-ScottH | hey Greg | |
| DELL-ToddM | Hey Greg! Hows it going? | |
| ramseyg_dell | hello - pretty good. . keeping busy. . .I mean normal. . . | |
| DELL-ScottH | working half days again ? .... | |
| DELL-ScottH | 12 hours | |
| ramseyg_dell | exactly. . . . . :) | |
| DELL-ToddM | Well - we might be a little light on attendance today - with July 4th coming up | |
| Dell-Marc joined. | ||
| DELL-ScottH | no pain, no gain ! | |
| DELL-ToddM | Hey Marc - Glad to see you! | |
| DELL-ScottH | yeah, just looks like a bunch of Dell dorks | |
| Dell-Marc | Nice to be here | |
| DELL-ScottH | Marc being the biggest ! | |
| DELL-ScottH | no wait, I'm the biggest | |
| Dell-Marc | dorkydorkydorky doo | |
| DELL-ScottH | and scrappy doodle doooooooo | |
| Dell-Marc | Ive been gone a couple - hows it been? | |
| DELL-ToddM | Scott and I were both on vacation last week as well | |
| DELL-ToddM | So it has been the typical digging out my inbox the last day or so | |
| DELL-ToddM | Following up on last week's flexaddress chat - | |
| DELL-ToddM | There was an article on the register that is pretty good - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/01/dell_flex_address_blade/ | |
| DELL-ToddM | That is if you are into blades and cool whiz bang technology | |
| DELL-ToddM | Today | |
| DELL-ToddM | we are scheduled to disucss the benefits of iscsi for Virtualization | |
| DELL-ToddM | However - we can discuss anything we want esp if no customers are going to show up | |
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| DELL-ToddM | I ran across an interesting blog post on virtual geek that had some good iscsi info included and even mentioned Marc's favorite topic - Fcoe | |
| DELL-ToddM | http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/answers-to-a-bu.html | |
| DELL-ScottH | Marc what's the market penetration for iscsi vs Fibre ? .. something I'm curious about | |
| Marc-Dell joined. | ||
| DELL-ScottH | nice link Todd, looks like a good read | |
| DELL-ToddM | Marc - I suspect that Java has caused you problems again | |
| DELL-ScottH | I don't think Marc fixed his java problems | |
| Marc-Dell | Sorry guys, I got bounced out - my java client almost always freezes my system - then its a power off sort of thing | |
| Marc-Dell | yep | |
| Marc-Dell | whats a muthuh to do? | |
| DELL-ScottH | that stinks .. at least it's a "YP" and not an "MP" | |
| DELL-ScottH | Your Problem not My Problem | |
| DELL-ToddM | While you were out I included a link to a blog post on Virtual Geek - http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/answers-to-a-bu.html | |
| Marc-Dell | thanks for the elucidation | |
| DELL-ToddM | Has some iscsi data and talks about the Fcoe issue a bit | |
| DELL-ToddM | He is on your side - although he appears to be an Emc guy | |
| DELL-ScottH | Marc I was asking you what percentage of enterprise storage is iscsi vs fibre in the market right now | |
| Marc-Dell | what's their opinion? | |
| DELL-ScottH | jusrt curious | |
| Marc-Dell | Most of its fibre | |
| Marc-Dell | probably over 90% of installed San storage. I don't keep up real well with the numbers | |
| DELL-ScottH | but that's just a time thing, right... like Lps before Cd's ? | |
| DELL-ToddM | Virtual Geek is very pro iscsi - I couldn't figure out who he is (who he works for or whatever) | |
| Marc-Dell | but the growth in iscsi is in the 70-80% range whereas Fc growth is single digits | |
| Marc-Dell | you know the whole Fcoe thing is interesting. - it will make a difference | |
| Marc-Dell | I'm not a fan, but I think Dell or any other vendor is crazy not to have products | |
| DELL-ToddM | I agree that you have to have Fcoe - because some fibre customers will want to go that way | |
| Marc-Dell | The last company to shut down Fc was Adaptec and look where it got them | |
| Marc-Dell | Yes, there are certainly customers that have storage needs that are larger than what iscsi can handle | |
| DELL-ToddM | It reminds me of the early days of x86 servers | |
| DELL-ToddM | There were lots of customers that still needed big iron | |
| Marc-Dell | in what way? | |
| Marc-Dell | oh yeash | |
| DELL-ToddM | But that has continued to decrease as x86 has matured and improved | |
| DELL-ToddM | I suspect that iscsi will have the same type of adoption | |
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| DELL-ToddM | Everybody will do it to a certain extent, and it will grow over time | |
| DELL-ScottH | hey chad ! | |
| DELL-ToddM | Hello Chad | |
| Marc-Dell | Theres so much Fud about iscsi, but it will probably never replace Fc completely | |
| DELL-ScottH | reminder to everyone .. you can click on | |
| chad | hello | |
| DELL-ScottH | "action" .. "recent room history" to catch up on the conversation | |
| chad | tkx | |
| DELL-ToddM | Is this the Dell Chad that knows everything about blades? Or another Chad? | |
| chad | i would say another chad... | |
| Marc-Dell | What do you want to find out or talk about? | |
| DELL-ToddM | We have been disucssing iscsi and fibre channel in general terms - but are open to anything | |
| chad | just poking in the chat.. to see what it was about really. did a small iscsi implementation a while back. really liked it but Fc still seems to rule mainstream. | |
| Marc-Dell | Btw, U guys see the Flexaddress announcement today? | |
| Marc-Dell | Whats your environment like? | |
| Marc-Dell | So I'd agree for the most part. I'm a big iscsi bigot, but Fc does rule the mainstream still today | |
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| Marc-Dell | There is some very cool stuff in iscsi that got the advantage of hindsight - coming as it did after Fc was already out | |
| DELL-ScottH | hi Brian | |
| DELL-ToddM | Hello brian | |
| Marc-Dell | Of course, not everybody implements it | |
| Brian | Hello | |
| chad | large... mainly Dx and Clarion based | |
| DELL-ToddM | I think that a big advantage with iscsi is that you don't have to do zoning | |
| DELL-ToddM | Makes admin and setup easier | |
| chad | iscsi was more of a test the technology for a lower cost storage solution. that could afford to be slightly slower disks. | |
| Marc-Dell | Fc really blew network routing and virtualization, but that stuff has been more or less repaired | |
| Marc-Dell | a lot of people mistake bandwidth for transmission speed and latency | |
| Marc-Dell | they think just because iscsi runs at a Gb/sec that its slower than 4Gb Fc - but that's not true - the mian difference is how much stuff is in the pipe | |
| DELL-ScottH | yeah driving my Yugo down an 8 lane highway gets me to the store just as fast as when I drive down the 2 lane road | |
| Marc-Dell | iscsi subsystems with 15k Sas drives are extremely fast | |
| DELL-ToddM | Small block random I/o should perform about the same as long as disk are same Rpms | |
| Marc-Dell | yes | |
| Marc-Dell | So one of the problems iscsi has had is that some of the vendors just ported their Fc controller code to iscsi and didn't optimize it in any way | |
| DELL-ToddM | I could guess which vendor you are talking about... but I won't | |
| Marc-Dell | Avctually there are several; There's a function in iscsi called iscsi redirect that allows an I/o to be re-routed through another port if that would be preferable | |
| Marc-Dell | So its possible to load balance traffic through multiple ports that way with far better granularity than what you typically get with multipathing software that has "large chuck" granularity | |
| chad left. | ||
| Marc-Dell | Of course, the Dell Equallogic iscsi products use it, which is one of the reasons I/o performance is so good with these systems | |
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| DELL-ToddM | Brian - You joined a few minutes ago - Anything specific you wanted to talk about? General topic is iscsi | |
| DELL-ToddM | Hey Jeff! | |
| Jeff_Glenn | Did I miss anything exciting? | |
| Marc-Dell | a few typos - more than a few | |
| Kristoffer joined. | ||
| DELL-ToddM | Of course - Action Recent Room History will fill you in the details | |
| Jeff_Glenn | Thanks! | |
| DELL-ToddM | Welcome Kristoffer. Good to see you | |
| Brian | I've been running iscsi on our Esx clusters since 3.0 now and am real close to migrating to Nfs and was interested in any benefits of iscsi I might be missing before I through the switch | |
| Kristoffer | Hi guys :) | |
| DELL-ScottH | hey kristoffer ! | |
| DELL-ScottH | and Jeff ! | |
| Marc-Dell | I think the benefits have more to do with product implementations than with the protocols used | |
| Brian | We use Netapp filers and have Fc, iscsi and Nfs available to us | |
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| DELL-ToddM | Hey Robby! | |
| Brian | The Fc never made much sense from a cost perspective for the loads we are running | |
| Marc-Dell | In that case, I'd use Nfs too. Their iscsi implementation is pretty slow | |
| Brian | I bought into the iscsi is better than Nfs stuff from Vmware | |
| Brian | We just finished some benchmarking that puts Nfs at about 25% faster than iscsi | |
| Marc-Dell | Yeah, but Netapp runs their iscsi through their native file system - I'm not sure how the mapping works, but it maps a volume space over the file space so they can get the same snapshot function. It gives operating compatibility, but the performance overhead for Netapp's iscsi is pretty high | |
| Brian | I really like the idea of getting away from Lun management and getting thin-provisioning by default as well | |
| Brian | That's definitely what we have seen | |
| Marc-Dell | Like I said - if I was using Netapp filers - I'd go Nfs too. But here are much better iscsi implementations, but I don't necessarily want to go into selling mode here | |
| Marc-Dell | What are your scaling needs? | |
| Brian | We are mostly working with lots of small data centers. about 4 Esx hosts and 50 Vms each | |
| Brian | we already have all the Netapp storage in place so adding a shelf where needed was easier than adding new heads | |
| Marc-Dell | Is this a hosting business? | |
| Brian | software development company | |
| Marc-Dell | Ok | |
| Marc-Dell | Overall, how is Netapp doing for you? | |
| Brian | pretty good for its intended uses | |
| Brian | It was originally Nas only, and it's great for that | |
| Marc-Dell | If you are already running Vmware machines through the Netapp Filers now, I think you'll be Ok once you get everything ported over to Nfs. Do you have any 10 Gb connections? | |
| Brian | Just starting that migration process | |
| Marc-Dell | I have no idea what the resulting Nfs processing overhead would be for Vmware systems with lots of small guests. Probably Ok if they don't use the network too much | |
| DELL-ToddM | Kristoffer - I know that you are using blades for a hosting environment. Are you using iscsi storage or just local disks? | |
| Marc-Dell | But, if network utilization climbs, then Nfs could have some disadvantages at 10 Gb - but that depends on net utilization | |
| Kristoffer | I'm using iscsi, just installed a md3000i, and have a ax4 waiting... | |
| Brian | We'd looked at the Md3000i for some smaller sites without Netapp filers already in place | |
| Kristoffer | It's going to be so exciting... | |
| Brian | how's it doing? | |
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| Kristoffer | Right now it performs really well with the 15K disks... | |
| Kristoffer | but the Sata disks have some kind of problem... | |
| Brian | was that 15 disks without additional shelfs? | |
| Kristoffer | on a 2 sas disk raid 1 i get 100+mb/s - on a 2 sata disk raid1 i get 15mb/s :( | |
| Kristoffer | yes, without shelfs... | |
| Kristoffer | I'm currently gathering data on the issue for my dell tech friends | |
| Marc-Dell | Go Todd | |
| DELL-ToddM | I can get the Md guys to take a look | |
| DELL-ToddM | I haven't heard of the issue before | |
| DELL-ToddM | We only have the 15K disks in our Md3000is | |
| Kristoffer | no.. it's really strange... same server, same everything, only the disks is different... | |
| Marc-Dell | The controller is different too - no? | |
| Kristoffer | no, I moved both volumes to the same controller | |
| Kristoffer | I miss some performance statistics or graphs in the storage manager... what do you guys use? | |
| DELL-ToddM | For Md3000i - windows perfmon on the host | |
| Kristoffer | I plan to graph the performance wiht snmp and nagios, but is there some kind of "free" statistics tool with a nice web front end? :) | |
| Kristoffer | sure... | |
| Kristoffer | i could do that... | |
| DELL-ToddM | You are running Xen on Linux though aren't you | |
| Kristoffer | yes ;) | |
| Kristoffer | but i have windows running in virtual machines... | |
| DELL-ToddM | And the virtual machines are attached via software iscsi initiator to the Md3000i? | |
| Kristoffer | Yes, open-iscsi - It would just be nice to have some kind of idea abot disk access, cache statistics etc... | |
| DELL-ToddM | that is the initiator is in the Vm | |
| Kristoffer | no, the initiater is in the host... the vm's just see a normal disk attached to them... | |
| Kristoffer | all iscsi failover/loadbalancing etc. is only done on the host | |
| DELL-ToddM | Ok - I like that approach better | |
| Kristoffer | this way I've got 2 15K disks to give me 100+mb/s under optimal conditins | |
| DELL-ToddM | not sure what to recommend for performance monitoring of Md3000i from Linux | |
| DELL-ToddM | Let me ask our Linux gurus what they use | |
| Kristoffer | sure, would be cool :D | |
| DELL-ToddM | I will post as a comment to the home page for this chat | |
| Kristoffer | but the tools should be for the entire md3000i, not per partition | |
| Kristoffer | to see which clients use up all the I/o's ;) | |
| DELL-ToddM | Understood | |
| DELL-ToddM | Well - we are over time just a bit | |
| DELL-ToddM | I want to thank everybody for attending and particiapting | |
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| Marc-Dell | so long | |
| Kristoffer | thanks and bye guys :) | |
| Kristoffer left. | ||
| Marc-Dell | Thanks for coming! | |
| DELL-ToddM | We'll see everybody next week for another iscsi chat! | |
| Marc-Dell | ::smoke | |
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, Jul 2 2008, 10:44 AM EDT
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| Started By | Thread Subject | Replies | Last Post | |
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| todd_muirhead | Performance Monitoring of MD3000i from Linux | 6 | Jul 15 2008, 12:16 PM EDT by todd_muirhead | |
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Thread started: Jul 3 2008, 12:34 PM EDT
Watch
During the chat Kristoffer had a couple of questions around the MD3000i. One of which was how do you monitor the performance from a Linux system? I checked with a good Linux friend of mine and he recommends the sysstat package (or RPM) which includes iostat.
Anybody else have a recommendation? |
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