RE: Netapp and VMware... It's all so confusing!

Afteroon, or Morning where ever you maybe

We currently run Iscsi to all our exchange and sql boxes, we see better stats using Iscsi than we ever did with locally attached disks. All the servers have 2 interfaces and are trunked together, although because of the way the trunking works you will only ever get 1GB/s or close to it to the filer as most implemtations of trunking are based around MAC address.

As for Vmware and Netapp, I got a totally diferent answer out of the netapp support guys in the UK, which is yes its fine and it works and they are happy to support it, apart from a problem on linux, but I wasn't paying attention to that bit as we a are a microsoft shop here.

We hope to start our Vmware Netapp pilot within the next couple of months and we plan to use Iscsi all the way, no FC anywhere. I will happily share highlights with the group as it seems to be a popular subject.

Cheers

Matt

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Willeke, Jochen Sent: 31 January 2007 15:03 To: Scott Lowe; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Netapp and VMware... It's all so confusing!

Hi,

do i get it right that VMWare stated ISCSI on Gigabit Ethernet is at 70%speed of 2 GB FC?!? That would mean that ISCSI on a trunked 2Gbit Ethernet would be nearly the same speed as FC!

Would be great to know as we always were told that ISCSI is too slow and dangerous :D

Best Regards and thanks a lot for sharing your experience

Jochen

-----Original Message----- From: Scott Lowe [mailto:slowe@EPLUS.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 3:16 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Cc: Willeke, Jochen; Reinoud Reynders; Benn, Paul; Timothy Hollingworth Subject: Re: Netapp and VMware... It's all so confusing!

Lots of good points here. Whether or not you virtualize Ex2K3 depends upon a great many factors. In many cases (especially for larger installations), virtualizing Exchange may not be the optimal approach. However, in smaller installations, virtualizing Exchange is not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, as pointed out already, Ex2K7 is a different beast altogether, primarily because it is 64-bit only.

I would be surprised if both NetApp and VMware were *NOT* already working on tools to help improve the NetApp-VMware relationship. In fact, I heard rumors at VMworld 2006 that there was a "SnapManager for VMware" in development. Supposedly, this would bring about the same level of application support that other members of the SnapManager family current provide for Exchange, Oracle, UNIX, and SQL Server.

I do have live experience with running VMDKs via iSCSI, but not via NFS (not yet, anyway). VMware has presented statistics that show iSCSI on Gigabit Ethernet to run at about 70% of the speed of 2Gb Fibre Channel. (If you were at VMworld and participated in one of the Performance lab, those statistics were borne out in a real-world configuration using NetApp storage systems.)

Regards, Scott Lowe Senior Engineer ePlus Technology, Inc. slowe@eplus.com Office: 919.326.3641 Fax: 919.326.3691 Mobile: 919.274.0462

On Jan 31, 2007, at 7:40 AM, Willeke, Jochen wrote:

Hi.

i think Reimound is exactly what it is about. For big Exchange Installations there is really no need for VMWare. We have an Ex2k3 site with about 6000 users, which is not to big, and even VMWare said that they would not virtualize our Exchange Servers. Another point is that one big figure for Ex-performance is the memory which is limited to 3GB in Ex2k3 (with the 3gb-switch). But there is only one "store"-process running and if you look in your taskmanager on your Ex-Servers you may see, that it is using about 800MB-1GB, seldom more. So you see that with Ex2k3 virtualisation may be ok. But with Ex2k7 there is a complete new memorymanagement. I do not know the new limit but be sure, that Ex2k7 will make use of the memory it can get! So the idea would be to have a lot of memory for Ex2k7 to make it fast, memory that can no longer be used by other VMs running on the same host....Sorry for drifting away from storage :D

But from the point of interaction between Netapp and VMWare i can only agree that there are a lot of things which are "nice-to-have", e.g. some kind of Snapmanager for VMWare which makes it possible to use the mechanisms of VMWare to set a VM into backup mode (not suspend, like discribed on NOW!) and create a snapshot on the Server.

By the way, has anybody already made live experience with VMWare vmdk's on ISCSI Lun's or NFS-exports?!? Is FC really the protocol of choice for a modern systems-architect :D?

I prefer Porsche,too...

Regards

Jochen

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner- toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Reinoud Reynders Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 9:08 AM To: Benn, Paul; Timothy Hollingworth; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Netapp and VMware... It's all so confusing!

Hi Paul, Timothy,

This is a great discussion, and not as easy as we want. Of course do I want to use the best of both worlds. Here some comments:

1.   Is it useful to run an exchange server on VMWare? In most  
   

of the cases, Paul has maybe right. We have almost 8000 mailboxes, and indeed the added value of VMWare is relative small. We use there snapdrive, snapmanager and MSCS for the backup and DR job. We are running exchange on physical machines. The only reason why I wood use VMWare is for standardisation, but the disadvantages are today to big.

2.   But you have the same problem with ms SQL server. We have  
   

more than 70 SQL-servers. Here's a really advantage to go to VMWare. That's what we are doing today. But at that moment I loose snapdrive and snapmanager. This hurts. You go back to the stone age:

a. My DBA can't do anymore the basis storage tasks: create lun, expland lun, take snapshots, ... He must, like in the old days, go back to my storage admin and ask him to do this tasks. No, this is not correct, it's much worse: he must go to my VMWare admin, to ask more diskspace and the VMWare admin must go to my storage admin to solve the simple problem. So, my DBA is not happy (he must wait) and also my storage admin is not happy (he must work again). Only the VMWare admin likes this (but he will change his mind) because he's in control of everything J

b. We have create a totally different DR and Backup procedure for our SQL servers. It's not as good as snapmanager for SQL. For standardisation of procedures, we use the same scripts and procedures also on our large SQL servers, those are running on physical machines.

3.   It's paint full to see that two great product (VMWare and  
   

ONTAP/WAFL), with almost the same philosophy (virtualisation of storage or servers, easy of management, ...), are not integrated on a

higher level. The combination works fine today, but you loose a lot of the WAFL functionality.

4.   iSCSI running in the virtual machine works fine, but it's  
   

slow. The latencies of the SQL server (and also the max IO/secs) are for most applications (in our case) not good enough. So that's not an option.

A nice discussion is also the choose between raw devices or VMDK's. I believe that you do a lot more with your VMWare, if you can use raw devices on the netapp. The only problem here is that there is a limit in VMWare of 254 luns in your VMWare "cluster". When you count a least 2 lun's for each VM and we have more than 200 VM's, you see that you reach very fast that limit. I didn't count the preferred setup of my SQL DBA: he want 10 LUNs for every SQL server. So for me, this is not an option. I have to use VMDK's.

So Paul, I think a lot of people are hoping that you will find a way to do this. Snapdrive would be a great start, so that we can distinguish us again from the other guys who don't use netapp, and so that we just can come back in the modern times.

Ps: I prefer the Porsche RC3.

Best regards,

Reinoud Reynders

IT-Manager Infrastructure & Operations

University Hospitals Leuven - Belgium

Van: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner- toasters@mathworks.com] NamensBenn, Paul Verzonden: woensdag 31 januari 2007 4:06 Aan: Timothy Hollingworth; toasters@mathworks.com Onderwerp: RE: Netapp and VMware... It's all so confusing!

Hi Timothy,

Having been an ASE certified master mechanic in a past life, I can advise you that it is indeed possible to have both of those cars as long as they are kept as separate vehicles. It would real mess if you chopped those cars in half and then welded them together into one new car. Think of all those electrical splices and incompatible electronics! Then, of course, there's that whole warranty and support thing. Who will you go to when the Acura leather cracks?

...

Or am I completely blind and missing something?

Well, just the fact that neither SnapDrive nor SnapManager are supported with VMware. The only "virtual server" - if you even want to call it that - that is supported with these products is the Exchange virtual server that is created in a Windows ("MSCS") cluster.

Another interesting question that may be worth investigating prior to putting this into production is whether or not Microsoft supports the use of Exchange on VMware. Here are a couple of articles on that:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320220/

It is not clear in your email what the motivation is to go "virtual" for your Exchange server. If it is for DR purposes, then there may be another way you can accomplish your goals. There is a solution documented in NetApp Knowledgebase article #10542 that takes advantage of the virtual server in Windows clustering. Perhaps this article will help you accomplish your goals?

http://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb10542

Please let us know if you have any more questions.

Regards,

Paul Benn

SnapManager Development Team

NetApp

From: Timothy Hollingworth [mailto:thollingsworth@eplus.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 5:06 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Netapp and VMware... It's all so confusing!

So, say for example, I want to virtualize an Exchange server. Lets also say that I want to manage it via Snapdrive and SME. Lets also say, just for the heck of it, that I want both the new front- engined Acura NSX as well as the Porsche RC3.

The cars aside, I would have to run iSCSI from within the VM, install and use Snapdrive from within the VM to provision LUNs, install Exchange and then use SME? It seems kind of silly to use iSCSI from within a VM if the ESX box were fiber attached to the Filer, just to be able to use Snapdrive and SME, no?

I would love to be able to use the features of SD and SME within a completely virtual environment and am wondering what some real world implementations other VMware/Netapp customers are running. Do you run storage for the databases and logs in VMDK's and manage snapshots and backups from a VMware virtual machine perspective or do you manage them as iSCSI LUNs and use SD and SME?

Or am I completely blind and missing something?

Timothy L. Hollingworth

Sr. Network Engineer, ePlus Technology Inc.

678.462.6698 (cell)

AIM: HollingworthTim

YIM: t_holling

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