I'll give my coworker Chauncey full credit for pointing out the recent paper by VMware on the subject of protocol performance at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/storage_protocol_perf.pdf. I'm reluctant to join a religious conversation about FCP vs NFS and really don't mean to stir the pot but just thought I'd put it out there to foster technical discussion.
There is no doubt about the superior functionality provided by VMware +Netapp Snapshot.
Timothy L. Hollingworth | Sr. Network Engineer | ePlus Technology Inc. MCSE | VMware VCP | HP ASE-BladeSystem | NetApp ASA/NACA | Symantec Technical Specialist HollingworthTim (AIM/YIM) | 678.462.6698 (Cell) | http://www.eplus.com
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Vaughn Stewart Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 8:33 AM To: Jack Lyons; Milazzo Giacomo Cc: Buerger, Andreas; Nick Silkey; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: R: R: VMware - snap - backup
There are many customers running 100s and 1000s of VMs over NFS. It seems like a natural way to integrate NetApp's storage virtualization directly with VMware, and NFS performs on par with FCP. You should try it, you'd be surprised.
Cheers,
Vaughn Stewart | Virtualization Evangelist
________________________________ From: Jack Lyons jack1729@gmail.com Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:09:12 -0500 To: Milazzo Giacomo G.Milazzo@sinergy.it Cc: "Buerger, Andreas" andreas.buerger@wincor-nixdorf.com, Nick Silkey silkey@ece.utexas.edu, toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: R: R: VMware - snap - backup
I don't speak for VMWare but I know that they are moving away from only storing ISO and templates. There are several good size implementations of vmware on nfs. We have about 2 dozen VM's running on nfs and another 40 running on FCP.
Milazzo Giacomo wrote:
And I've to (re)correct you :-) NFS? Avoiding phylosophical discussion on performances, VMware itself states to use it just for ISO or templates... you perfectly know how much costs the NFS license! Terrible!!! iSCSI is free (bundle) and we've tested also on huge SATA disks...no issues.
Why do you said that iSCSI implementation is horrible? It's so easy to setup...
-----Messaggio originale----- Da: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] Per conto di Buerger, Andreas Inviato: martedì 4 marzo 2008 14.38 A: Nick Silkey; toasters@mathworks.com Oggetto: RE: R: VMware - snap - backup
I have to correct you :) We did some tests with vcb and iscsi, it works fine, but vcb in general was not very convenient. And the other thing is that the iscsi implementation in esx is horrible. Use NFS to earn more flexibility and an even better performance.
That's the experience we've made.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Nick Silkey Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 1:17 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: R: VMware - snap - backup
Milazzo Giacomo wrote:
As I told you in another mail your environment make me more persuaded that the best thing you could do is to use VCB.
VCB = VMWare Consolidated Backup?
AFAIK, it is not an option in an iSCSI environment[1] ... if this is not the case, do correct me as we are aggressively pursuing iSCSI on our 3020s as a prod means to store vmdks for ESX. :)