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29769
November 10th, 2015 08:00
Best Practice inquiry: storage tiering with differing disk types
Hello,
We recently received a new Equallogic SAN, and I am trying to decide how to implement. Our first unit (currently only member in a pool) is a PS4100 with 24x600GB 10K SAS. The new unit is a PS4210 with 12x4TB 7.2K NL SAS.
Should I leave the units in separate pools in the same group, and carve out new LUNS? Should I add the PS4210 into the existing pool, and utilize storage tiering?
I'm a bit unsure about how the storage tiering will work, I've read quite a bit that when mixing disk types, storage tiering will balance on capacity, and most of the IO load will hit the higher capacity SAN.
Any input is appreciated. The storage is used for VMFS datastores with vSphere 5.5 cluster. Running EQL firmware 8.1.0 on both units.
bhtech
3 Posts
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November 10th, 2015 09:00
Thanks for the feedback Donald. I should have mentioned, both arrays are configured as RAID6.
Given the size of my infrastructure (Very small, two PS4XXX series arrays and four R610's) I believe I will just leave the members in their own pools until such a time as I encounter any performance restrictions.
Capacity based load balancing does not work well for my needs, I was hoping the filers would tier the storage at block level, but it appears to be done at volume/LUN level, still a bit too used to NetApp.
additionally, thank you for the recommendation of modifying the NOOP_TIMEOUT value, I had read TR1091 prior to implementing my PS4100X array a couple years ago, so I believe the rest of the configuration items should already be done to best practices, with the exception of the heartbeat vmkernel ports, I guess I no longer require those :) Any harm in leaving them there?
bhtech
3 Posts
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November 10th, 2015 10:00
Thanks for the follow up again Donald, really appreciated. We are planing to migrate to vSphere 6 for our cluster in the near future. I'm still doing some reading on VVOLs, but I did watch the EQL 8 presentation that gave an overview of the VVOL functionality.