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9 Posts
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328764
January 5th, 2016 10:00
Snapshots Reserve
I have a Dell PS6100 that we use for our VM storage. I had one of our contracted techs tell me today that by setting Snapshot reserve to 0% (we don't use them), that he learned in his Dell class years ago that this would cause "a drop in IOP performance".
This sounds like gabarge to me. I've disabled snapshots on SANs before in the past and never seen a performance hit or ever heard of that being the case. Technically it doesn't make sense to me. Thought I would double check though as I've been wrong before. Thoughts?
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kevinzak
9 Posts
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January 5th, 2016 14:00
Don,
Thank you for the clarification.
As per your suspicion, unfortunately this guy just talks out of his rear end a lot. We had already discussed leaving a ~10% overhead since we are over-provisioned, so I think he just made this up on the spot and wanted billable hours.
Thank you!
kevinzak
9 Posts
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January 6th, 2016 09:00
Don,
Thankfully our growth is pretty slow and we're a relatively small organization, so my team has pretty much unanimous control over the usage.
We're currently using it solely for VM storage and use less expensive NAS storage for actual backups and VM snapshots.
Right now we're sitting at about 9TB total storage with 10K SAS drives in that PS6100. We have about 30% free space left. We are going to be putting a plan in place for adding more storage although we probably won't put that plan in place for another year or so.
As far as performance goes, we're pretty happy with what we have right now (we don't run any production DBs off of it or anything), so we're considering adding a second SAN device and keeping the one we have, rather than upgrading to something bigger and newer and ditching the old one. What are your thoughts on this? Would love to hear your advice.
kevinzak
9 Posts
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January 6th, 2016 09:00
Don,
We run space reclaiming fairly often..
The current 6100 is fully populated, yes.
For the most part we have followed the best practices guide. Some irreversible things were done before I was hired that I'm not in love with, but what we have seems to work pretty well.
We are running a pretty old EQL firmware to be honest. I don't know the exact version, I'll have to check when I get back to the office.
kevinzak
9 Posts
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January 6th, 2016 09:00
Looks like 7.0.1 on the firmware.
kevinzak
9 Posts
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January 6th, 2016 10:00
Don,
I just always use the default 200.
Never had a problem with an unexpected restart, but yes ideally I would like to upgrade. The MSP that used to do this work for the company bought the service contract in their name and then just rebilled it, so I have no access to firmware downloads at present moment. Working on renewing a contract for our company.
Origin3k
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2.3K Posts
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January 6th, 2016 12:00
Check what your Hosts(Initiator) is certified for and take a look if jumping from 7.0.1 directly to the latest 7.x is allowed.
The majority of my EQLs is on 7.1.9 and this would be my recommendation. You should update SANHQ also and dont forget to apply the FW Drive Package on the EQL as well. The FW Drive kit looks for affected drives first and when found something its upgrading one drive after another. Took 2-3min on a 24 drive EQL.
Regards,
Joerg
kevinzak
9 Posts
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January 6th, 2016 12:00
Oh wow, that was super easy. Didn't realize that was all I needed to do. Thank you so much Joerg!
Don, do you recommend going to 7.1.9 then or 8.1.1?
Note: I will look at recommended paths tonight, just figured I'd ask while I had a chance of getting a response yet today.
Origin3k
4 Operator
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2.3K Posts
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January 6th, 2016 12:00
You can try to sign up for an account under http://eqlsupport.dell.com/ . You need the ServiceTag of your EQL6100 (GroupManager->Member->Maint its on the upper right and there is a icon to copy it to the clipboard.)
Regards,
Joerg