Storage Virtualization / Hyperconvergence Technologies - Best Use Case?
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@NetworkNerd said:
So, if you were starting over with server virtualization at your company, would you look at maybe getting servers with all local storage, 7200 RPM drives, and using one of these software technologies over going to 10K SAS, SSDs, or vSAN?
These technologies might change the IOPS equation some but the need for faster spindle speeds, SSDs and other technologies remain. You still need to look at the big picture. No amount of caching can completely overcome drive subsystem speeds.
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@NetworkNerd said:
After seeing some storage virtualization vendors at Spiceworld like Infinio and Maxta, it makes me wonder how applicable / valuable those types of technologies would be to the SMB.
Infinio is just a cache. It assumes that you still have external storage. It is designed to accelerate your SAN or NAS to make it work even better. Which is a great idea. It does this by using system RAM and CPU which, in turn, means that you lose those resources for your VMs. It's a great idea but not without tradeoffs and it does nothing to change the need for storage, just makes it possible for existing storage to work better. And it works best in a large pool of virtualization servers, not lone ones (or else the entire cache is only <8GB.)
http://www.infinio.com/product/how-it-works
Using Infinio eats up two vCPUs and 8GB of RAM on each host. So consider that when looking at the big picture. If you have a single virtualization platform you will lose a tiny bit of CPU performance and 8GB of RAM. If you started with 64GB, your platform just dropped to 56GB. Not exactly a trivial shrinkage. That's between one and eight typical VMs that you can't run because you are adding this cache - per host.
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I remember Maxta and Pernix as well as Atlantis saying they do storage reclamation and dedupe. But I think each has it's own virtual appliance that runs on each host to be able to do this.
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Infinio sounded cool but will only work for NAS or SAN from what I remember - no local storage or DAS (at least not right now).
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@NetworkNerd said:
Infinio sounded cool but will only work for NAS or SAN from what I remember - no local storage or DAS (at least not right now).
DAS should work, I would be pretty surprised if it had any means of detecting when something was DAS or SAN since the only difference is if there is a switch hooked up.
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@NetworkNerd said:
I remember Maxta and Pernix as well as Atlantis saying they do storage reclamation and dedupe. But I think each has it's own virtual appliance that runs on each host to be able to do this.
That's pretty much what they would have to do, which is how VSA worked. It's about the only available approach when working in that way.
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I thought the VSA had to be setup a certain way from the beginning but was near impossible to add to the cluster later (because a certain amount of storage on each host was to protect against another host failing) whereas these software solutions would be able to install in an existing environment non-intrusively and allow you to add hosts / more storage at any time.
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@NetworkNerd said:
I thought the VSA had to be setup a certain way from the beginning but was near impossible to add to the cluster later (because a certain amount of storage on each host was to protect against another host failing) whereas these software solutions would be able to install in an existing environment non-intrusively and allow you to add hosts / more storage at any time.
Yes, but they are all VMs.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@NetworkNerd said:
I thought the VSA had to be setup a certain way from the beginning but was near impossible to add to the cluster later (because a certain amount of storage on each host was to protect against another host failing) whereas these software solutions would be able to install in an existing environment non-intrusively and allow you to add hosts / more storage at any time.
Yes, but they are all VMs.
I think NetworkNerd is saying that you can't (his and my understanding) add VSA after the fact because the underlying disk that ESXi is using is already partitioned off, so there won't be any free space, or most likely not enough, to implement VSA after the fact?
I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?
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@Dashrender said:
I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?
You can build your own VSA to see how it works. You can do it with Linux or BSD quite easily. You build a virtual NAS (which is what VSA means) and use DRBD (Linux) or HAST (BSD) to make the cluster work. You share the storage to the local machine via NFS. Now you have a VM that can provide storage for the other VMs locally.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@NetworkNerd said:
I thought the VSA had to be setup a certain way from the beginning but was near impossible to add to the cluster later (because a certain amount of storage on each host was to protect against another host failing) whereas these software solutions would be able to install in an existing environment non-intrusively and allow you to add hosts / more storage at any time.
Yes, but they are all VMs.
I think NetworkNerd is saying that you can't (his and my understanding) add VSA after the fact because the underlying disk that ESXi is using is already partitioned off, so there won't be any free space, or most likely not enough, to implement VSA after the fact?
I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?
Yep - that's exactly what I meant.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?
You can build your own VSA to see how it works. You can do it with Linux or BSD quite easily. You build a virtual NAS (which is what VSA means) and use DRBD (Linux) or HAST (BSD) to make the cluster work. You share the storage to the local machine via NFS. Now you have a VM that can provide storage for the other VMs locally.
Quite easily to SAM is not so easy to the person who is semi-familiar with Linux.
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@NetworkNerd said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?
You can build your own VSA to see how it works. You can do it with Linux or BSD quite easily. You build a virtual NAS (which is what VSA means) and use DRBD (Linux) or HAST (BSD) to make the cluster work. You share the storage to the local machine via NFS. Now you have a VM that can provide storage for the other VMs locally.
Quite easily to SAM is not so easy to the person who is semi-familiar with Linux.
It does sound like a cool project to try out to get more familiar with those technologies though. If I find some spare hardware I may dig into it to test it out.
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@NetworkNerd said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?
You can build your own VSA to see how it works. You can do it with Linux or BSD quite easily. You build a virtual NAS (which is what VSA means) and use DRBD (Linux) or HAST (BSD) to make the cluster work. You share the storage to the local machine via NFS. Now you have a VM that can provide storage for the other VMs locally.
Quite easily to SAM is not so easy to the person who is semi-familiar with Linux.
Something SAM needs to be reminded of occasionally.
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@art_of_shred said:
@NetworkNerd said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?
You can build your own VSA to see how it works. You can do it with Linux or BSD quite easily. You build a virtual NAS (which is what VSA means) and use DRBD (Linux) or HAST (BSD) to make the cluster work. You share the storage to the local machine via NFS. Now you have a VM that can provide storage for the other VMs locally.
Quite easily to SAM is not so easy to the person who is semi-familiar with Linux.
Something SAM needs to be reminded of occasionally.
That's why you are here, Art - to slap him around a bit.
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@NetworkNerd said:
@art_of_shred said:
@NetworkNerd said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?
You can build your own VSA to see how it works. You can do it with Linux or BSD quite easily. You build a virtual NAS (which is what VSA means) and use DRBD (Linux) or HAST (BSD) to make the cluster work. You share the storage to the local machine via NFS. Now you have a VM that can provide storage for the other VMs locally.
Quite easily to SAM is not so easy to the person who is semi-familiar with Linux.
Something SAM needs to be reminded of occasionally.
That's why you are here, Art - to slap him around a bit.
Well, I'm here to chew bubble gum and slap people ...and I'm all out of bubble gum.
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Someone has to chew the gum around here.
