First Production VMware Build

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Looking forward to putting in place my first production VMware build, it's not massive and will be on vSphere 5 Essentials Plus.

Three ESXi5 nodes with 32GB of RAM in each connected to an HP P2000 G3 1GB iSCSI SAN.

I will be lashing in some jumbo frames uisng HP2510 switches.

Happy days!

 

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Cool, essentials plus is actually pretty feature rich as long as you dont need to virtualize tons of servers. I take it your company likes flogging HP san's then Just started setting up my new companies vmware infrastructure 3 dl360s 192GB max across them and 2 vnxe 3100's. I'm going to have 2 servers and a SAN on the production site and one in a DR site with the two vnxe's replicating.

Are you going to deploy the vCSA or just use the standard windows vCenter?

 

This is something that I wanted to look into, when I have a second, I will definitely test it out!

 

Nah mate, bog standard, will be working on another which is 96GB of RAM per server with 5 nodes in the Cluster soon, on average we role out a new vCentre installation once a month.

So you are replicating the SAN's, what are you using to change the subnets of all your servers etc if you had to bring them up in a DR situation?

Also what frequency are you replicating A synchronous, synchronous or snapshot mate?

vCentre we are rolling with the standard.

 

I like the idea of the vCSA and have played around with it in a lab enviroment, its nice but just feels a little bit, well unfinished I guess, thomasmc and I have had a brief discussion on this between ourselves. I think it'll work but even on vmware communities I cannot get any responses about how the vCSA works in the real world, so I just rolled with bog standard vcenter.

Yes the SAN's will be replicating and our DR is just out of async range (that and it'll cost us an arm and a leg to keep a line going just for that), so sync every 10 minutes or so is good enough for me. We have a decent line for a small company but I'm just going to have to monitor generated traffic and possibly make alterations to the sync timescale depending on how much squirting it does to the line or not.

I was going to use a variation upon this on simon longs blog. I guess it'll boil down to trial and error and see in our case what makes the DR servers usable with as microsoft like saying "the least amount of administrative effort".

 

Good times mate, I will have a proper erad of that as we do use vReplicator at a couple of our sites and out DR stategy has been to disable the NIC's in the VM's and then bring the servers up and change them manually in the console.

It works, but this could make it a damn site easier in future.

I'm going to implement Jumbo Frames and seperate iSCSI vSwitches to increase the throughput back to the iSCSI Iniator Adapter.

 

Sounds like you lad will be having some fun over the next couple of days

@Dale, if you need to get more from you WAN for replication have a chat with the HyperIP boys as they should be able to help you in that regard.

@Craigie, have you tried Jumbo Frames with all this kit before? The reason I ask is when I enable it in our environment the performance decreases surprisingly enough so could be worth testing with and without before making a decision

Great article with lots of comments from very high up storage people
Jumbo Frames Comparison Testing with IP Storage and vMotion


p.s If your looking for a performance boost the make sure your align the disks, best thing I could ever have done

 

We have done some basic performance tests such as:

- Copying an ISO from one server to another on different ESXi Nodes
- Moving an extracted ISO from from one server to another on different ESXi Nodes
- Copying an ISO to a datastore from an ESXi Node
- Copying an extracted ISO to a datastoer from an ESXi Node

We got a performance increase of between 40% to 700%.

Just checked our disk alignment and everything is on 64K stripe sizes, this is the default on P2000, P4500, VMFS and also on Windows Server 2008.

This isn't something we have done on purpose, but happy days that we are aligned