Last Month, I attended a Brocade Net.Ed Session that covered Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and the idea of Server I/O Consolidation. If you missed the Net.Ed sessions, you can learn about it at Brocade’s Training Portal. Once you register / login, click on Self-Pased Training and search or browse for FCoE 101 Introduction to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). It’s free. Here is an unabridged report about the Net.Ed session with some of my opinions wrapped in:
Trends
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Just thought I would share these diagrams that I used in a recent training session. I used them to explain the differences in the storage protocols that may be used for a vStorage Cloud and how FCoE works. Click on the images for a larger view.
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Yes folks, it rears its ugly head again…Disk Alignment… If you have not read it yet, check out the whitepaper on disk alignment from VMware.
First, chethan from VMware posted a great thread on VMTN about I/O performance in vSphere. The start of the thread talks about I/O, then leads into anice discussion about block size. A couple of weeks ago, Duncan Epping posted a very informative article about block sizes. It convinced me to use 8MB blocks in VMFS designs.
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In the previous years Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery have been big buzz words. All companies small and large vowed to launch initiatives to implement either or both in their current IT strategies. My question is what happened? Why is it that I rarely see organizations that have implemented or even have a plan to implement Disaster Recovery?
Is it a lack of understanding? Is it that most companies believe it is to expensive or complicated to implement? Well it doesn’t have to be either. Most companies that are undergoing virtualization initiatives already have half if not more of what they need to implement Disaster Recovery. The simple fact is if you already have at least two data centers and are virtualizing you are a prime candidate. Here are some common question and my answers regarding this subject:
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A few days ago I wrote a blog about ESX local partitions. A good question was raised after I wrote the article concerning ESX hosts that boot from SAN. In my last article I asked the question “Should the partition scheme be standardized, even across different drive sizes? My question today is should that standard also be used when booting from SAN? I’ve heard the argument that when booting from SAN you should make the partitions smaller to conserve space. Anyone have an opinion on this? I feel it should conform to the standard. We determine the partition sizes for a reason based on need, and that same need still exists regardless of what medium you are booting from.
My recommendation would be to develop a standard partition scheme and utilze it across all drive sizes and mediums. You can find my recommended partition scheme in my previous post mentioned above.
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I had a conversation with some colleagues of mine about ESX local disk partitioning and some interesting questions were raised.
How many are creating local vmfs storage on their ESX servers?
How many actually use that local vmfs storage?
Typically it is frowned upon to store vm’s on local vmfs because you loose the advances features of ESX such as vMotion, DRS, and HA. So if you don’t run vm’s from the local vmfs, then why create it? Creating this local datastore promotes it’s use just by being there. If you’re short on SAN space and need to deploy a vm and can’t wait for the SAN admins to present you more storage, what do you do? I’m sure more frequently than not you deploy to the local storage to fill the need for the vm. I’m also sure that those at least 20% of the time those vm’s continue to live there.
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I have been seeing a lot of activity in the VMTN forums regarding datastore sizing and free space. That said I decided to write a post about this topic. There are endless possibilities when it comes to datastore sizing and configurations but I’m going to focus on a few keep points that should be considered when structuring your ESX datastores.
All VM files kept together
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