Supportability for ESX I cannot say, but
the NetApp VMWare whitepaper tells you how to set up thin-provisioned VMDKs.
Why wouldn’t you de-dupe the white space in the VMDK? If all zeros are
written, then it should de-dupe just fine ;)
Supportability for A-SIS is another thing
I cannot say for sure, but I know it works J The only documentation
I can find (up to 7.2.4) states something about it only being supported for
NetBackup on NetApp.
From: jeff.mery@ni.com
[mailto:jeff.mery@ni.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008
2:48 PM
To: Glenn Walker
Cc: Daniel Keisling; Bill Holland;
owner-toasters@mathworks.com; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: De-dup'ing Primary
Storage
Like the others, thanks for the info. At one
point, A-SIS wasn't supported in true "production" roles, meaning in
a Tier-1 use case. Has that changed recently? If so, I think I need
to make some phone calls =).
On
the thin provisioning - ESX doesn't support thin-provisioned VMDK's yet. Workstation
does that by default, but I'm not sure about VMware Server. Hopefully ESX
is coming soon though. I would still imagine a fair amount of reclaimed
space once ESX does come through. While you'll no longer de-dupe the
white space in a VMDK, I'd imagine you'll still de-dupe all the base OS
commonalities.
Jeff Mery - MCSE, MCP
National Instruments
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"Allow me to extol the virtues of the Net Fairy, and of all the fantastic
dorks that make the nice packets go from here to there. Amen."
TB - Penny Arcade
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From:
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"Glenn Walker"
<ggwalker@mindspring.com> |
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To:
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"Daniel Keisling"
<daniel.keisling@austin.ppdi.com>, "Bill Holland"
<hollandwl@gmail.com>, <toasters@mathworks.com> |
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Date:
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02/13/2008 12:37 PM |
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Subject:
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RE: De-dup'ing Primary Storage |
Just keep in mind that we were using IOMeter to
test, not actual real world workloads – we were also very much disk bound in
our testing. If you are neither using IOMeter (ie, a real-world workload)
nor disk bound, I can’t foresee it being a huge problem.
We’ll be testing with NFS dedupe a bit later today and I’ll
gladly share that info if you want. Same number of disks, so same
stipulations exist.
And because the question did come up, the VMWare server guy
didn’t build the VMDKs with thin provisioning, so it may have also impacted the
testing.
Glenn
From: Daniel Keisling
[mailto:daniel.keisling@austin.ppdi.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 12:37 PM
To: Glenn Walker; Bill Holland; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: De-dup'ing Primary Storage
Thanks for the stats, I'll be de-duping VMWare data soon too.
My NetApp storage tech says that read cache peformance will
increase since you're reducing the total number of actual blocks. I have
not heard of any performance degradations with A-SIS, other than filer overhead
(CPU) when SIS is actually de-duplicating. My A-SIS schedules are during
off-peak hours so it's not a concern of mine.
Daniel
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com
[mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Glenn Walker
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:42 AM
To: Bill Holland; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: De-dup'ing Primary Storage
We’ve been doing some VMWare testing with FCP LUNs and A-SIS.
We saw a reduction from 471GB to 21GB with only about a 7%
reduction in performance. More than a fair trade-off in my opinion.
Our testing could have had impact on the performance more
than the de-dupe, however.
Glenn
From:
owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Bill Holland
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 6:50 AM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: De-dup'ing Primary Storage
To those of you that have implemented Nearstore and A-SIS on your primary
storage:
1. Have you seen any difference in overall filer performance?
2. If you have LUNs, how are your space savings on those volumes?
I know that enabling Nearstore does some system tweaking in the background to
increase the number of concurrent backup streams that can be running, but I
don't know what else it tweaks that may adversely affect performance of a
primary storage system. Afterall, it was originally designed to run as a
secondary storage platform.
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