I think every question
you asked screams NFS but I understand the license is expensive. Your hosts are
your ESX hosts so 64 should not be an issue unless you’re talking about a
massive set up (and I don’t think VMware supports that large currently,
at least not in a single cluster). It should be referring to hosts, not VMs…
unless you’re using NPIV in which case I have no idea.
Back to question 1, I’ve
never seen a good answer on this. I think it is always going to depend on your environment
but in my experience the bottleneck for literally 95%+ VMware implementations
has been at the spindle level not how you’ve configured your LUNs. I’ve
got a 3070 so probably a bit slower than what you are working with running 400
VMs from tiny to massive (32 gig SQL 2008 data warehouse) via NFS, several FC
connected pSeries boxes that I can’t get rid of as well as home/dept
directories for around 1k users.
Still spindle bound J
From:
owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Fred Grieco
Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2010
12:49 PM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Cc: fred.grieco@dds.net;
paul.regan@dds.co.uk
Subject: FC port fan-in
Toasters,
I am looking at the specs for the Netapp 3140 cluster, and attempting to find
the answers to two questions:
1) How many VMWare hosts can I have looking at the same set of LUNs? Before
I have real-world performance issues?
2) How many multipathed hosts can I have, total, pointed at a four-fc-port
cluster?
The limit in #1, according to NOW, is 256 (256 initiators per igroup).
What are your experiences in with this in large VMWare farms?
#2 seems to be 256 according to NOW, but there is a limit called "FC port
fan-in" of 64. This would seem to limit the total number of HBA
initiators pointing at a port to 64, which, since all my HBAs see all my ports,
would limit the total hosts to ... 64? What does this number mean
effectively for hosts with two cards?
TIA,
Fred