Glenn,
Thanks for the info, perhaps it's time to get a NFS license for my filers.
Cheers
Matt
-----Original Message----- From: Glenn Dekhayser [mailto:gdekhayser@voyantinc.com] Sent: 11 July 2007 14:55 To: Davies,Matt; Scott Lowe; Forest Leonard; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: List still active?
Advantages IMHO 1) VMDKs on NFS are by default THIN-Provisioned; 2) Throughput is about equal 3) NFS is a heck of a lot easier to administer 4) There's 3x longer history and knowledgebase on NFS network t-shooting.
Dis-Advantages: 1) You can do a QLogic iSCSI card to offload CPU processing of packets; 2) In a big environment you can use iSNS; 3) You can be much more granular with masking/etc (although I can imagine you can be creative with NFS) 4) NFS is stateless (v2), to be run fastest you use UDP; so to make it reliable it gets a little slower (but still not a real biggie)
Anyone else?
Glenn @ VOyant
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner- toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Davies,Matt Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 9:35 AM To: Scott Lowe; Forest Leonard; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: List still active?
Scott,
Any chance you could expand on the advantages of NFS over Iscsi ? NFS isn't an area I have any experience of....
Cheers
Matt
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner- toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Scott Lowe Sent: 11 July 2007 14:05 To: Forest Leonard; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: List still active?
Forest,
When it comes time to configure VMkernel for VMotion, then I'd definitely recommend keeping it separate from the virtual machine network. As it stands right now, you don't even need a VMkernel NIC configured because it sounds like you are using Qlogic iSCSI HBAs and only have a single ESX Server. Since the Qlogic cards handle the iSCSI traffic and there is no VMotion, there no current need for a VMkernel NIC (unless you want to use NFS from the FAS to provide additional storage for VMs--which, by the way, works pretty well and has some nice advantages over iSCSI, IMHO).
Regards, Scott Lowe ePlus Technology, Inc. slowe@eplus.com
On Jul 11, 2007, at 8:33 AM, Forest Leonard wrote:
Interesting stuff. I only have one ESX server so I haven't gotten to the Vmotion configuration yet.. That should be later this year.
I just configured a RDM to run a Virtual server on. I found an
article
where you want to create the type as NTFS if it is a RDM for a
windows
host. Not sure if I am going to use this going forward. I actually don't know if you can migrate into a RDM. It doesn't look like it.
I am only using 2 NIC's on my Vmware server.. and a QLOGIC card for
my
ISCSI access.. I may need to look at bulking up my NIC configuration. It looks like I may gain some performance if I separate my VMKernal from my Virtual Machine network?
Thanks, Forest
-----Original Message----- From: Davies,Matt [mailto:MDAVIES@generalatlantic.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 8:18 AM To: Forest Leonard; ggwalker@mindspring.com; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: List still active?
Sounds like we are both at the same stage.
We are not using RDM's yet, however when it comes to exchange we
will
have to, or I may just stick with using the Microsoft Iscsi initiatator from within the VM, not exactly supported, but I know of other
people
doing it.
We have migrated 8 machines so far, into just one datastore and have not seen any performance problems at all, although most of the machines have very low IO requirements.
We are using a script to snapshot and then replicate using
snapmirror,
it works very well, however our Virtual Centre server is also a VM which was causing a few problems with the snapshots on the VMware side not being removed, but moving this to a separate datastore seems have cured the problems, even SQL doesn't seem to have a problem.
The script is the one written by Evan Battle, that is in the newest netapp docs on VMware. I did have a few problems with ssh to the filer, but we are now using rsh and it seems to be ok.
I don't know how you have setup your virtual switches on the ESX
side,
but I got some best practice information out of VMware on that subject.
Each of our ESX IBM3550 host servers have 6 Nics, connected as follows.
2 Nics for service console VMKernel for Vmotion, load balance using Virtual port ID
2 Nics for Virtual Machine network, load balance using Virtual port
ID
2 Nics for ISCSI (Service Console and VMKernel), load balance using
IP
Hash
Hope this helps....
-----Original Message----- From: Forest Leonard [mailto:fleonard@rvigroup.com] Sent: 11 July 2007 11:06 To: Davies,Matt; ggwalker@mindspring.com; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: List still active?
Hey Matt... I am actually doing the exact same thing on a FAS 270..
I
have migrated about 7 servers so far.
Are you using RDM's (remote device mappings) for the Virtual Machines? I actually just created 2 200GB LUNs on the netapp to use as
Datastores
and have not had any performance issues.
Just wondering what your experience with RDM's are.. I added one into a virtual machine.. It just lets you map a LUN directly to a Virtual machine.
Has anyone out there used the netapp script to capture a VM
snapshot?
Thanks, Forest
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Davies,Matt Sent: Wed 7/11/2007 1:00 AM To: ggwalker@mindspring.com; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: List still active?
Still working by the looks of things.
busy in process of migrating all our physical severs to VM, stored on a iscsi lun on a FAS 270.
For those that want to know we are using the software iscsi
initiator
within ESX and have not had any problems so far.
cheers
matt
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com owner-toasters@mathworks.com To: toasters@mathworks.com toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wed Jul 11 01:03:49 2007 Subject: List still active?
I've noticed that I'm still subscribed, but have received no email since July 4th. Everyone didn't trade their NetApp gear for something
else
while I was out of town did they?? J
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