A few months ago we did a popular series of chats on selecting the right server for virtualization. Now it's time to discuss what is the right storage for your virtualization deployment. The answer is of course different for everybody depending on specifc requirements, existing infrastructure, knowledge and skill level, available budget, and so on. This chat is to discuss the topic of how to select the right storage solution.

Technical Community - Background Reading

Storage Choices for Virtualiation Can Be Easy
PowerVault MD3000i Storage Consolidation Study
Details on attaching Dell iSCSI storage to VMware

Chat Transcript

DELL-ToddM	Hello everybody!
DELL-ToddM	We will be getting started in just a few minutes with today's chat on Storage and Virtualization
DELL-ScottH	Hey guys
DELL-ToddM	Are you guys there?
DELL-ScottH	I vote yes
	tsherbak joined.
DELL-ToddM	Dave? Jake? jcurcurato?
DELL-ToddM	Hey Tim!
DELL-ToddM	Thanks for joining
	Steve_Arrington joined.
jcurcurato	Hello
tsherbak	Hello
DELL-ToddM	We are waiting for the crowd to gather—usually about 5 minutes or so
jcurcurato	Np, going to get a fresh cup o' joe...brb
	Karthik joined.
DELL-ToddM	Welcome Steve!
Steve_Arrington	Hello
DELL-ScottH	Hello Steve!
	M_ahmadian joined.
DELL-ToddM	Welcome Karthik
DELL-ToddM	Hey M_ahmadian
Karthik	Hello Todd!
DELL-ToddM	Looks like people are starting to filter in.
DELL-ToddM	We will officially start the chat in just a couple of more minutes
DELL-ToddM	Anybody have some pre-questions?
Jake	Jake here…had to step away for a minute
DELL-ToddM	Yo Jake!
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DELL-ToddM	Hey Roger
Dell-RogerF	Howdy.
DELL-ToddM	Let's get started.
DELL-ToddM	First, I will briefly intro today's topic and then I will ask Steve, Tim, and Karthik to introduce themselves
DELL-ToddM	The topic for today is Storage for Virtualization 101, meaning that we are going to talk broadly about storage for virtualization :)
Karthik	My name is Karthik and I am a product marketing manager at Dell for PowerVault disk storage
DELL-ToddM	I would like to cover the areas of choice—DAs, iSCSI, Fibre, and so on—with some basic reasons for why to choose each
DELL-ToddM	It would be really great to have any questions from anybody who is deciding what storage to use now
DELL-ToddM	We will discuss them and they can be good examples for everybody
tsherbak	My name is Tim Sherbak. I am a member of the EqualLogic marketing team specialized in virtualization
DELL-ToddM	Thanks to Tim and Karthik for volunteering to attend as storage experts
DELL-ToddM	We also have Steve. Can you intro yourself as well?
Steve_Arrington	I'm Steve Arrington and I'm a Product Marketing manager for the MD product line.
Jake	I am just implementing VMware. We have DAs in way of local hard drives on each of the three blades. Each blade has two HBAs installed. My plan is to connect both of the HBAs to a LUN and have the VMs stored on the SAN.
DELL-ScottH	Which SAN, or is that up for discussion?
Jake	Fiber connections
DELL-ToddM	Jake - That sounds like a good plan. What type of SAN are we talking about? What type of storage are you considering?
Jake	Unfortunately, the purchase of the SAN went the way of IBM and not Dell.
DELL-ScottH	:-(
Jake	It is a DS4300
Jake	10 SAS 146 GB drives, 14 500 GBb SATA drives, two drawers
DELL-ScottH	Political or features decision?
DELL-ScottH	What type of VMs? Are you targeting different workloads for the SAS and SATA?
Jake	mainly cost, but partially Features
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Jake	The SAS are for high-end data apps like Exchange, the SATA are for disk to disk backups and data that is not needed to be quickly accessible.
DELL-ToddM	This sounds like a good plan. You will need to be sure to size the Exchange disks properly. Most likely Exchange will need dedicated disks for mailbox server role
DELL-ToddM	Why Fibre and not iSCSI?
Jake	Our pinnacle SQL DB is also on the SAS. Exchange is already running on the drives. I have four TB left for VM and other uses.
DELL-ScottH	How many VMs are you loading up on each blade? How many users on Exchange?
Karthik	Jake, what virtualization are you planning on? ESX or Hyper-V or…?
Jake	I am not entirely sure why Fibre and not iSCSI. I believe speed was a consideration; the blade center having two Fibre switches, and other servers already having Fibre cards
DELL-ScottH	Which version of VMware? The ESXi?
Jake	ESX servers are up and running on three M600 blades. VirtualCenter up and running on external server and running capacity planner on the 11 servers we are planning to migrate
Jake	We have VI3 foundation license
DELL-ScottH	Sounds like you are set; anyway, can we get you to try a fabulous Md3000i? :-) Maybe for second disaster recovery site?
Jake	That will be possible for future use. We are trying to get our data center in order first and then we will move out to our DR site
DELL-ScottH	Good to hear that you are planning for it; always better than having the failure and then justifying later
DELL-ToddM	You mentioned disk-to-disk backups; are you planning to back up the VMs? Or just the data in the VMs with agents?
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Karthik	Got it... Do you run any VMs today or will this be your first deployment?
Jake	We have 30 buildings across town to choose from. 20+ elementary, 3 middle, and 3 high schools
DELL-ToddM	Welcome Al - Action, Recent Room history will get you caught up
Al	Thanks
Jake	I converted my first yesterday to the local storage.
DELL-ScottH	Yes, coming back to me now; you've been here before, right?
Jake	We are running a Tivoli server for backups and not quite sure the direction we will take with VMs
Jake	Yep, every Tues for the last few weeks
DELL-ScottH	How easy has it been to bring the physical into virtual? Painless?
DELL-ScottH	We have so many Jakes, was just making sure :-)
DELL-ToddM	I have used the VMware converter to move some of my servers into VMs—it worked pretty well
Jake	It was about 30-45 minutes, shut down the physical, bring up the VM and change IP. Piece of cake!
Jake	Not sure on the Linux boxes we have though
Karthik	Yep
DELL-ToddM	There are lots of options for VM backup; I don't know much about Tivoli however :)
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Jake	Is there a specific way I should set up the LUN or a good rule of thumb for disk space? General Windows 2000 or 2003 servers
Karthik	Steve had to step out, but I am still here to help
DELL-ToddM	In general you can follow the same type of guideline for Windows, but there are some differences
DELL-ToddM	You don't usually need more than about 15 GB for the Os partition
DELL-ToddM	Unless you have some kind of app that needs to install on the C:\
DELL-ToddM	I actually ran across this good Webcast earlier today that talks about lots of the considerations around using storage with virtualization
Dell-Karthik	Jake, size of the LUN really has to do with how many VMs you are running and how big they are. It wouldn’t be any different than in a non-virtualization environment
Jake	If I go to convert a home folder share server to a VM, how do I manage its connection to the SAN for the folder? It is connected via dual Fibre connections now. What happens when I try to VM Convert it? Will it try to make a VMDK for the SAN storage? That would be horrible.
Jake	Todd, Linky?
DELL-ToddM	I linked to it at the bottom of this page - http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/selecting+storage+for+virtualization
Jake	Thanks
DELL-ToddM	The VM is not aware of the SAN directly, so it won't know about the dual Fibre connections
DELL-ToddM	That will be managed by the ESX server
DELL-ToddM	So you will assign the LUN at the ESX server level to the VM?
Jake	In the VMware training course I took it mentioned a capacity planner that vendors have that is far and above what comes with Vi3
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Jake	In researching this, there are screen shots of CP that show disk size and usage of the physical servers
DELL-ToddM	When you do the convert, you will just convert the C drive, and then assign the existing LUN as an RDM (raw device mapping)
Jake	The CP with Vi3 just shows CPU and memory
DELL-ToddM	To the VM
Jake	Cool. I was worried about that one.
Jake	I have asked my Dell tech rep on the blades and VMware about it, and he said he would check into it.
Jake	On the Capacity Planner
DELL-ScottH	We do have some simple services that could help: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/services/adi/virtualization?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
DELL-ScottH	Not sure if you'd want to go down that path
DELL-ScottH	I've got a demo from using the VMware Converter, but can't remember if I had any SAN storage connected at the time
Jake	http://www.vmware.com/files/images/diagrams/consolidatin_detail_large.gif
Jake	Is what I want... :)
DELL-ScottH	http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/vmware+demos
DELL-ScottH	Services group uses that tool
DELL-ToddM	The assessment services that we have include a capacity planner report
Jake	So what would be the benefits of DAs versus Fibre? are we losing anything going with Fibre?
DELL-ToddM	Does anybody else have questions about which storage to use? (don't want to leave anybody out)
DELL-ScottH	Heck no
DELL-ScottH	You are gaining
DELL-ScottH	You want to vMotion, right?
Jake	K, certainly don't let me run the conversation
DELL-ToddM	No Fibre is a great, very solid, high performance technology (would of course be better if it was a Dell Fibre array :) )
Jake	Eventually, but the license we have does not include it
DELL-ToddM	I don't want to run you off Jake; just wanted make sure nobody was standing on the sidelines
Jake	It would have already been set up if it was Dell, ::biggrin
DELL-ScottH	I think once you get many VMs up, you'll quickly see the value of being able to move them around. It won't be hard to justify license cost
DELL-ToddM	The big difference between DAs and SAN (iSCSI or Fibre) is scalability
Jake	I learn as much from everyone elses questions as my own
DELL-ScottH	I hear you on that one
DELL-ToddM	You can continue to add additional capacity and performance with SAN, that can be shared across lots of systems
DELL-ToddM	DAs are much more limited in terms of scalability, and it is attached to a single system
Dell-Karthik	In general, if you want to know about interface decisions, there is a whitepaper on the Dell.com Md3000 page: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/isci_fc_sas_interface.pdf
DELL-ToddM	Cost is of course a big difference as well :)
DELL-ScottH	Yes, most of the Fibre arrays allow you to expand the LUNs without losing the data, and get more spindles for performance
DELL-ToddM	So test and dev VMs on a virtualization server are a good candidate for DAs, assuming no need for vMotion
DELL-ToddM	So if you are using the new Hyper-v Server from Microsoft to set up a test and dev lab, then you might just need DAs
DELL-ToddM	See the cool new video of Hyper-v Server Install here: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/10-03-2008+hyper-v+server+install+video+for+free+-+comments
Jake	I have at my disposal two disk arrays that came off of the Exchange server after moving the mailbox storage to the SAN. Any thoughts on a good use for it? Besides my music collection?
DELL-ScottH	Yeah, I was going to say bittorrent bucket :-) Test bed for ESXi or Hyper-V
DELL-ScottH	What arrays are they?
DELL-ToddM	You could use the old Exchange server as the host. It probably has a decent amount of RAM
Jake	Yeah. That is what I was thinking...maybe I can use some of my converted servers and have my own little test VM environment!
DELL-ScottH	Most definitely geeking it out now!
Jake	The Exchange server is still running Exchange...just that the storage is on the SAN
Dell-Karthik	If you are setting up LCR on Exchange, that could be a another good use for it too. Or perhaps a temporary DR using a host-based replication....lots of choices
Dell-Karthik	I meant CCR
DELL-ToddM	Sorry, I was thinking that you had virtualized Exchange: http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/exchange+and+vmware
Jake	Huge performance gain! Disk array with three SATA drives moved to SAN with 10 SAS drives!
DELL-ScottH	Yeah, you could test out the SRM, DRs, vMotion on the arrays, get VMware to give you some test licenses
DELL-ToddM	That’s a huge upgrade in performance!
DELL-ScottH	I'd say, you should have seen a big performance gain!
Jake	The arrays are older Gateway ( I know it's a bad word, but Ted Waite went to our high schools...) They have space for 12 drives. One has Fibre and the other is iSCSI
Jake	No more pop sounds from Outlook
DELL-ScottH	I think I just threw up in my mouth a little :-)
Jake	Rolfl!
DELL-ScottH	Can you milk them?
DELL-ToddM	Ted was a cool guy—Pony tail and all!
Jake	I think we already have for the past five years!
DELL-ScottH	Too funny! lol
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Jake	Funny, most of our staff actually worked at the Gateway headquarters in North Sioux City, and now we buy Dell
Jake	Now that was a battle!
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DELL-ToddM	I understand, but Gateway is basically no more
DELL-ScottH	I bet, like the IBM sales guys down here in Round Rock (Austin) trying to get into the city offices
DELL-ToddM	What’s left is part of Acer?
DELL-ScottH	Not going to happen
Jake	Consumer went to Acer and Business-gov went to MPC
Jake	We were a major account, so our account went to MPC
Jake	No support
DELL-ToddM	I didn't realize that business side went to MPC
Jake	Certainly nothing like this chat
DELL-ToddM	Thanks :)
DELL-ScottH	We like to surround our customers on the chat and give them the warm fuzzies
DELL-ScottH	Thanks
DELL-ToddM	Speaking of this chat, we have come to the end of the hour
DELL-ScottH	And of course the correct technical content
Jake	Sorry if I monopolized
DELL-ScottH	Don't be; glad to have you
DELL-ToddM	Thanks to everybody for attending today. The transcript will be posted tomorrow
Dell-Karthik	Thanks everyone!
DELL-ToddM	Next week’s chat will focus on using EqualLogic with virtualization
DELL-ScottH	Thanks everybody!
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DELL-ToddM	Be sure to post questions to the site between chats!
DELL-ScottH	Jake, are you on twitter?
DELL-ScottH	We following you?
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jcurcurato	Thank you!
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Jake	Yeah, but not actively using...steehsekaj