advantages of using vmware vaai on hus 100 family

7/27/2019 Advantages of Using Vmware Vaai on Hus 100 Family

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August 23, 2012

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Lab Validation Report

Advantages of using VMware VAAI on HitachiUnified Storage 100 Family

Erico Cardelli, Chris Didato


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FeedbackHitachi Data Systems welcomes your feedback. Please share your thoughts bysending an email message to [email protected] . To assist the routing of thismessage, use the paper number in the subject and the title of this white paper inthe text.
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Table of ContentsProd uct Features ..............................................................................................................3

Hitachi Unified Storage 150...................................................................................3Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning ...............................................................................4

Hitachi Compute Blade 2000.................................................................................4VMware vSphere 5................................................................................................5VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) .............................................5

Test Envi ronment .............................................................................................................6

Test Metho dology ..........................................................................................................10

Cloning with Full Copy.........................................................................................11Block Zeroing Disk Utilization with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning.......................12Block Zeroing Performance Warm up..................................................................14Block Zeroing with Zero Page Reclaim ...............................................................15Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assisted Locking...................................17

Large Scale Simultaneous vMotion with Hardware-assisted Locking.................18 Thin Provisioning Stun.........................................................................................19

Analysi s ............. ............ ............ ............ ............ ............ ............ ............ ............. ............. 20

Cloning with Full Copy.........................................................................................20Block Zeroing Disk Utilization with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning.......................20Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assisted Locking...................................21Large Scale Simultaneous vMotion with Hardware-assisted Locking.................21

Thin Provisioning Stun ........................................................................................22

Comp lete Test Resul ts ...................................................................................................23

Cloning with Full Copy.........................................................................................23Block Zeroing Disk Utilization with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning.......................27Block Zeroing Performance Warm up..................................................................28Block Zeroing with Zero Page Reclaim ...............................................................30Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assisted Locking...................................31Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assisted Locking...................................33

Thin Provisioning Stun.........................................................................................33

Addi ti onal Infor mat io n abou t VMw are vStor age A PIs f or Ar ray Int egrati on .......... ...35

Full Copy..............................................................................................................35Block Zeroing.......................................................................................................36Hardware-assisted Locking .................................................................................37

Thin Provisioning Stun.........................................................................................38


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Advantages of using VMwareVAAI on Hitachi Unified Storage

100 FamilyLab Validation Report

These are the benefits of pairing Hitachi Unified Storage with vStorage APIs for This testing supports the following recommendations.

When requiring maximum initial performance, implement these settings:

Use eagerzeroedthick virtual disk format to eliminate performanceanomalies.

Configure Hitachi Unified Storage and Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning tonatively support thin provisioning without double overhead caused by thinprovision processing on the virtualization layer and the storage systemlayer.

Enable VAAI on all hosts to take advantage of Hitachi Unified Storagesupport of the vStorage APIs.

When requiring maximum cost savings and low administrative overhead,implement these settings:

Use thin or lazyzeroedthick virtual disks.

Configure Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning volumes.

Enable VAAI on all hosts to take advantage of Hitachi Unified Storagesupport of the vStorage APIs.

Enable the hardware-assisted locking features.

Run the zero page reclaim utility on Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning againstvolumes periodically

This paper is intended for you if you are a storage administrator, vSphere

administrator, application administrator or virtualization infrastructure architectcharged with managing large, dynamic VMware-based virtual environments. Youneed familiarity with SAN-based storage systems, VMware vSphere, and generalIT storage practices.


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Note Testing was done in a lab environment. Many things affect productionenvironments beyond prediction or duplication in a lab environment. Followrecommended practice by conducting proof-of-concept testing for acceptable resultsbefore solution implementation in your production environment. This means to testapplications in a non-production, isolated test environment that otherwise matches yourproduction environment.


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Product Features These are the features of some of the products used in testing.

Hitachi Unified Storage 150

Hitachi Unified Storage is a midrange storage platform for all data. It helpsbusinesses meet their service level agreements for availability, performance, anddata protection.

The performance provided by Hitachi Unified Storage is reliable, scalable, andavailable for block and file data. Unified Storage is simple to manage, optimizedfor critical business applications, and efficient.

Using Unified Storage requires a smaller capital investment. Deploy this storage,which grows to meet expanding requirements and service level agreements, forcritical business applications. Simplify your operations with integrated set-up andmanagement for a quicker time to value.

Unified Storage enables extensive cost savings through file and blockconsolidation. Build a cloud infrastructure at your own pace to deliver yourservices.

Hitachi Unified Storage 150 provides reliable, flexible, scalable, and cost-effectivemodular storage. Its symmetric active-active controllers provide input-output loadbalancing that is integrated, automated, and hardware-based.

Both controllers in Unified Storage 150 dynamically and automatically assign theaccess paths from the controller to a logical unit (LU). All LUs are accessible,regardless of the physical port or the server that requests access.

Due to tight integration, Hitachi Unified Storage works seamlessly with VMwarevSphere 5.0 implementations of the VAAI APIs. Native support enhances thefollowing:

Storage vMotion

Cloning

Virtual machine provisioning

SCSI reservation locking, which highly optimizes SAN performance forvirtualized environments.

Hitachi Unified Storage uses of native thin storage and high performance datamanagement. This creates a leveraged option of using thick storage at thevirtualization layer while the storage layer uses thin provisioning. This occurswithout any additional overhead.
http://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/hitachi-unified-storage-100-family.htmlhttp://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/hitachi-unified-storage-100-family.html


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Hitachi Dynamic ProvisioningOn Hitachi storage systems, Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning provides wide stripingand thin provisioning functionalities.

Using Dynamic Provisioning is like using a host-based logical volume manager(LVM), but without incurring host processing overhead. It provides one or morewide-striping pools across many RAID groups. Each pool has one or moredynamic provisioning virtual volumes (DP-VOLs) of a logical size you specify of upto 60 TB created against it without allocating any physical space initially.

Deploying Dynamic Provisioning avoids the routine issue of hot spots that occuron logical devices (LDEVs). These occur within individual RAID groups when thehost workload exceeds the IOPS or throughput capacity of that RAID group.Dynamic provisioning distributes the host workload across many RAID groups,which provides a smoothing effect that dramatically reduces hot spots.

When used with Hitachi Unified Storage , Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning has thebenefit of thin provisioning. Physical space assignment from the pool to thedynamic provisioning volume happens as needed using 1 GB chunks, up to thelogical size specified for each dynamic provisioning volume. There can be adynamic expansion or reduction of pool capacity without disruption or downtime.

You can rebalance an expanded pool across the current and newly added RAIDgroups for an even striping of the data and the workload.

Hitachi Compute Blade 2000Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 is an enterprise-class blade server platform. Itfeatures the following:

A balanced system architecture that eliminates bottlenecks in performance

and throughput

Configuration flexibility

Eco-friendly power-saving capabilities

Fast server failure recovery using a N+1 cold standby design that allowsreplacing failed servers within minutes
http://www.hds.com/products/storage-software/hitachi-dynamic-provisioning.htmlhttp://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/hitachi-unified-storage-100-family.htmlhttp://www.hds.com/products/compute-blade/compute-blade-2000.htmlhttp://www.hds.com/products/compute-blade/compute-blade-2000.htmlhttp://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/hitachi-unified-storage-100-family.htmlhttp://www.hds.com/products/storage-software/hitachi-dynamic-provisioning.html


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VMware vSphere 5VMware vSphere 5 is a virtualization platform that provides a datacenterinfrastructure. It features vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), highavailability, and fault tolerance.

VMware vSphere 5 has the following components:

ESXi 5.0 This is a hypervisor that loads directly on a physical server. Itpartitions one physical machine into many virtual machines that sharehardware resources.

vCenter Server This allows management of the vSphere environmentthrough a single user interface. With vCenter, there are features availablesuch as vMotion, Storage vMotion, Storage Distributed ResourceScheduler, High Availability, and Fault Tolerance.

VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), also known as primitives,allow vSphere environments to use advanced features of Hitachi Unified Storage.Using vStorage APIs provides a way to use the advanced storage capabilities of Hitachi Unified Storage from within the VMware interface. Processing is on thestorage infrastructure directly.

These performance enhancements move the I/O load from the dependantvCenter host platform into the storage controller. Instead of slowing processing byconsuming processing power, memory, and bandwidth, moving these operationsspeed operations, shift potential bottlenecks of resource constraint, and freevirtualization management for more critical tasks.

When used with vSphere 5.x, Hitachi Unified Storage supports the following APIprimitives:

Full copy This primitive enables the storage system to make full copiesof data within the storage system without having the ESX host read andwrite the data.

Block zeroing This primitive enables storage systems to zero out alarge number of blocks to speed provisioning of virtual machines.

Hardware-assist ed lockin g This primitive provides an alternativemeans to protect the metadata for VMFS cluster file systems, therebyimproving the scalability of large ESX host farms sharing a datastore.

Thin provisioning stun This primitive enables the storage system tonotify the ESX host when thin provisioned volumes reach certain capacityutilization threshold. When enabled, this allows the ESX host to takepreventive measures to maintain virtual machine integrity.

See Additional Information about VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration onpage 35 to find out more.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/mid-size-and-enterprise-business/overview.htmlhttp://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/mid-size-and-enterprise-business/overview.html


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Test Environment This describes the test environment used in the Hitachi Data Systems lab.

Figure 1 shows the physical layout of the test environment.

Figure 1


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Figure 2 shows the virtual machines used with the VMware vSphere 5 clusterhosted on Hitachi Compute Blade 2000.

Figure 2


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Table 1 has Hitachi Compute Blade 2000 and storage components used in this labvalidation report.

Table 2 lists the VMware vSphere 5 software used in this lab validation report.

All virtual machines used in this lab validation report used Microsoft WindowsServer 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition 64-bit for the operating system.

Table 1. Hitachi Compu te Blade 2000 and Storage Config uration

Hardware Description Version

Hitachi Compute Blade 2000chassis

8-blade chassis

4 1/10 Gb/sec network switch modules

2 management modules

8 cooling fan modules

4 power supply modules

8 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel PCI-e HBAports

A0195-C-6443

Hitachi E55A2 server blade 2 2-core Intel Xeon E5503 processors @2 GHz

144 GB RAM per blade

4 blades used in chassis

03-57

Hitachi Unified Storage 150 32 GB cache

4 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel ports

Multiple configurations of 600 GB 10k SASdisks

0915/B-H

Table 2. VMware vSphere 5 Software

Software Version

VMware vCenter Server 5.0.0 Build 455964

VMware vSphere Client 5.0.0 Build 455964

VMware ESXi 5.0.0 Build 441354


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Table 3 has the VMware vSphere 5 virtual disk formats tested in this lab validationreport.

Table 3. VMware vSphere 5 Virtual Disk Formats

Virtual Disk Type Description

Thin Virtual disk is allocated only the storage capacity required by the guest operatingsystem. As write operations occur, additional space is allocated and zeroed. Thevirtual disk grows to the maximum allotted size.

Lazyzeroedthick The virtual disk storage capacity is pre-allocated at creation. The virtual disk doesnot grow in size. However, the space allocated is not pre- zeroed. As the guestoperating system writes to the virtual disk, the space is zeroed as needed.

Eagerzeroedthick The virtual disk storage capacity is pre-allocated at creation. The virtual disk doesnot grown in size. The virtual disk is pre- zeroed. As the guest operating systemwrites to the virtual disk, the space does not need to be zeroed.


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Test MethodologyEach test case gathered timing and performance metrics from multiple sources.

All Hitachi Unified Storage management functions were performed usingHitachi Storage Navigator Modular 2 software.

All VMware vSphere 5 operations were performed using the vCenter andvSphere client.

To synchronize results, captures were taken from the following locations:

Hitachi Unified Storage

Hitachi Storage Navigator Modular 2

Graphical user interface

Command line interface

VMwareESX Host

ESXTOP gathered details from the virtual hosts

vCenter Server

Connected via the vSphere client

Virtual machines

VDBench

Generated load and logs directly from the virtual machines.

These are descriptions of the test cases:

Cloning with Full Copy on page 11

Block Zeroing Disk Utilization with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning onpage 12

Block Zeroing Performance Warm up on page 14

Block Zeroing with Zero Page Reclaim on page 15

Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assisted Locking on page 17

Thin Provisioning Stun on page 19


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Cloning with Full Copy The goal of this testing was to compare system performance with offloading thecloning process of virtual machines to Hitachi Unified Storage using the Full Copyprimitive enabled with off-loading the cloning process disabled.

The test procedure involved cloning the following from a source data store (RAID-6-source) residing on a dynamic provisioning pool to a destination data store on aseparate dynamic provisioning pool (RAID-6-target):

30 GB lazyzeroedthick VMDK

30 GB thin VMDK

30 GB eagerzeroedthick VMDK

Table 4 has the test cases.

These tests used the following process for all three test cases:

1. Create a dynamic provisioning pool with a single RAID-6 (6D+2P) group using600 GB SAS 10k RPM disks to create a VMFS datastore called RAID-6-source (HDP-0) .

2. Create a virtual machine running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with athin provisioned virtual disk format on RAID-6 -source (HDP-0) .

3. Convert the Windows virtual machine to a template.

4. Create a second dynamic provisioning pool with a RAID-6 (6D+2P) group asa VMFS datastore called RAID-6-target (HDP-1) using 600 GB SAS 10k RPMdisks .

5. For one of the test cases, provision a virtual machine of each virtual diskformat below from a template on datastore RAID-6-source (HDP-0) to a targetDatastore RAID-6-target (HDP-1) .

6. Provision all virtual machines with the Full Copy primitive disabled and with itenabled.

Table 4. Cloning with Full Copy Test Cases

Cas e Vi rt ual Di sk Dat a Fo rm at1 Thin format 30 GB virtual disks

2 Lazyzeroedthick format 30 GB virtual disk

3 Eagerzeroedthick format 30 GB virtual disks


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Figure 3 shows the storage layout.

Figure 3

Block Zeroing Disk Utilization with Hitachi DynamicProvisioning

The goal of this testing was to demonstrate the effect of using the Block Zeroingprimitive.

The test procedure involved provisioning virtual disks configured on an LU onHitachi Dynamic Provisioning pools with VAAI on and off within a fresh datastoreand a dirty datastore.

A fresh datastore is a newly formatted datastore that has not been used.

A dirty datastore is a datastore that has had VMDK files created anddeleted from it without enabling the block zeroing primitive or Zero PageReclaim options.

Figure 4 shows the location and setting of the block zeroing primitive within theadvanced settings of the ESX Host.

Figure 4


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Provision a Fresh Dynamically Provisioned VolumeUsing a 30 GB eagerzeroedthick VMDK file created on a fresh dynamicallyprovisioned volume, time and measure the actual disk space utilization processon the storage system with VAAI disabled and enabled.

The test starts with a fresh dynamically provisioned pool.

1. Set desired value for the VAAI primitive.

2. Run ESXTOP to capture all data.

3. Provision a virtual machine on a 30 GB VMDK eagerzeroedthick VMDK,

4. Measure disk space utilization on the Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning pool.

Provis ion a 100% Dirty Dynamically Provisioned VolumeUsing a 30 GB eagerzeroedthick VMDK file created on a dynamically provisionedvolume that is filled with data, delete the VMDK. This creates a dirty dynamicallyprovisioned volume where 100% of the pages within the volume remain allocated.

Then use the dirty volume to create a new VMDK. Time and measure actual diskspace utilization on the storage system with VAAI enabled on a dynamicallyprovisioned volume.

The test starts with a 100% dirty dynamically provisioned volume.

1. Set VAAI primitive to enable.

2. Provision a 30 GB eagerzeroedthick VMDK.

3. Measure disk space utilization on the dynamic provisioning pool.

4. Establish baseline storage utilization.

5. Ensure VAAI is enabled for Zero Page Reclaim.6. Run Zero Page Reclaim against LU.

7. Measure disk space utilization on the dynamic provisioning pool.
mailto:http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021976mailto:http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021976


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Block Zeroing Performance Warm up The goal of this testing was to examine the use of the Block Zeroing primitivewhen used to create a new VMDK disk on existing SAN or block presentations.Once creating the VMDK, the way that it can be accessed depends upon itsformat. There are performance inconsistencies until the disk has been completely

zeroed. To warm up a disk means to completely zero a disk.

This testing examined of the warm up effects of the various formats: thin,lazyzeroedthick, and eagerzeroedthick. Tests were conducted with the VAAIprimitive for block zeroing enabled and disabled on Hitachi Dynamic Provisioningpools.

The evaluation process created a VMDK file on a new (clean) dynamicprovisioning pool and then applying a 100% write load of 1000 IOPS from a virtualmachine using that VMDK file.

Table 5 has the different test cases used for warm up testing.

The test starts with fresh dynamically provisioned volume for each of the testcases.

1. Set the VAAI primitive.

2. Provision the VMDK.

3. Load the virtual machine with I/O from VD Bench.

4. Establish baseline for storage warm up.

Table 5. Warm Up Test Cases

Case VAAI Primitive Setting VMDK Format

1 Enable 100 GB eagerzeroedthick

2 Off 100 GB eagerzeroedthick

3 Enable 100 GB thin

4 Off 100 GB thin

5 Enable 100 GB lazyzeroedthick

6 Off 100 GB lazyzeroedthick


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Figure 5 shows the storage configuration used.

Figure 5

Block Zeroing with Zero Page Reclaim The goal of this test was to demonstrate optimization of a dynamically provisionedvolume by running Zero Page Reclaim and the Block Zeroing primitive. Zero PageReclaim leverages the virtualization of Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning pools tomove thick data around to enable the removal of any pages that are empty (orfull of zeroes). This shrinks the actual allocation of storage to create thin storage

allocations on the LU. This testing started with VAAI disabled on a lazyzeroedthick-provisioned virtualmachine, a 100 GB disk created, and 8 GB of data consumed. Consumed spaceis measured on the LU from the storage system. Then the VMDK is converted toan eagerzeroedthick VMDK to verify that the space is zeroed out. Afterprovisioning, Zero Page Reclaim was run on the LU to see the spaceconsumption.

Table 6 has these test cases.

Table 6. Zero Page Reclaim Test Cases

Case VAAI

1 On

2 Off


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The testing involved the following steps.

1. Run Zero Page Reclaim against LU.

2. Deploy a 100 GB lazyzeroedthick VMDK then convert to it to aneagerzeroedthick VMDK.

3. Measure storage consumption and allocation from the SAN and vCenter.4. Run Zero Page Reclaim against the LU.

5. Measure the storage consumption.

Figure 6 details the storage used during these tests.

Figure 6


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Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assistedLocking

The goal of this test was to create a large scale boot storm by powering 400 virtualmachines up concurrently to show the performance when using and not using theHardware-Assisted Locking primitive integrated into Hitachi Unified Storage whenenabled.

In this test procedure, 400 linked clone virtual machines evenly distributed acrossfour ESX 5.0 hosts on a single shared data store were powered on at the sametime. This test used the following:

A 24-spindle dynamic provisioning pool ( HDP-24D )

A smaller 8-spindle dynamic provisioning pool ( HDP-8D ) to increase thelikelihood of SCSI locking conflicts

Testing was conducted as follows for both spindle configurations:

Hardware-assisted locking enabled using the VMSF 5 File systemHardware-assisted locking disabled using the VMFS 3 file system

This data was collected:

The conflicts per second were collected from each host using ESXTOPand measured for the number of SCSI reservation locking conflicts todetermine the number of SCSI locking conflicts.

The elapsed time was captured through the vSphere client to measure thetime to complete the power on operations.

Figure 7 shows the storage layout.

Figure 7


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Large Scale Simultaneous vMotion with Hardware-assisted Locking

The goal of this test is to simulate a rolling upgrade to capture the performanceprofile of Hitachi Unified Storage when using the hardware-assisted lockingprimitive.

In this test procedure, 100 virtual machines of varying types (linked clones, thinprovisioned virtual machines, and virtual machines with snapshots) are evenlydeployed across four ESX 5.0 hosts. To simulate a rolling upgrade or planneddowntime, a single host is placed into maintenance mode. This forces VMwarevMotion to move the virtual machines on that host to the remaining three hosts inthe cluster. After moving all virtual machines from the host, the host is broughtback online.

This operation is repeated on all four hosts with hardware-assisted lockingenabled and disabled.

The vSphere client collects the time required for vMotion to move all the virtualmachines from each host. ESXTOP collected the conflicts per second from eachhost to determine the number of SCSI reservation locking conflicts. The vSphereclient captured the elapsed time to complete the power on operations.

Figure 8 shows the storage layout:

Figure 8


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Thin Provisioning Stun The goal of this test was to have the effect of increasing the utilization of theHitachi Dynamic P rovisioning pool capacity.

In this test procedure, an over-provisioned Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning pool wascreated. The VDBench utility was installed inside a virtual machine to write to thevirtual disk beyond the limits of the provisioned VMDK storage.

The following settings were set on Hitachi Unified Storage:

Host group option:

Set DP Depletion Detail Reply Mode to Yes .

Dynamic Provisioning Pool Consumed Capacity Alert:

Set Early A lert to 50%.

Set Depletion A lert to 70%.

The following was the procedure used in this test.

1. Create storage with a 100 GB LUN,

2. Create the VMDK.

3. Attach the VMDK to the virtual machine.

4. Run VDBench to perform 100% writes to the disk.

5. Evaluate error messages.

6. Extend the LUN storage to allow writes.


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Analysis This is the analysis of the test results.

Cloning with Full Copy

Testing for cloning with full copy showed the following:

Use of the full copy primitive improves efficiency by decreasing thedeployment time required to provision virtual machines. Significantimprovements can be seen with a thin format VMDK.

Full copy commands have significantly less I/O impact on the ESX host. This frees up HBA resources, which the host can use for other operations.

Use of the full copy primitive reduced the number of IOPS consumed bythe host HBA. The full copy primitive reduces host-side I/O during commontasks, such as the following:

Moving virtual machines with Storage vMotion

Deploying a new virtual machine from a template by instructing thestorage system to copy data within the storage system, rather thansending the traffic back and forth to the ESX hosts


Testing for block zeroing disk showed the following:

Provisioning with VAAI on is faster in all cases where the Hitachi DynamicProvisioning pool does not contain dirty pages.

Using the Zero Page Reclaim utility significantly optimizes provisioningwhen storage is reclaimed from within a pool by disassociating the storageof unused pages to allow more flexible and rapid congruence.

Using a VMDK formatted in eagerzeroedthick performs without anyperformance penalties from either ESX or Hitachi Unified Storage as soonas they are provisioned.

If the desire is to reduce the amount of writes to a storage device withoutmodifications to block allocation, lazyzeroedthick provides the immediatebest option as zeroing is done at the initial write time.


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The block zeroing primitive speeds virtual machine deployment by off-loading the repetitive zeroing of large numbers of blocks to the storagesystem, which frees ESX host resources for other tasks.

Hardware-accelerated thin provisioning is achieved when using VAAI withHitachi Dynamic Provisioning, as shown in Table 7 .

Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assistedLocking

The results of this test show that a datastore with a reduced number of spindles isprone to increased locking. This increased locking can harm performance andlimit the number of virtual machines that can be run on a single datastore.

The use of hardware-assisted locking primitive greatly improves the scalability of vSphere by allowing more virtual machines per datastore to run concurrently.Running more virtual machines concurrently in a datastore allows consideration of larger VMFS volumes.

With the hardware-assisted locking primitive enabled, greatly reduces thelikelihood of SCSI reservation locking conflicts during everyday tasks, such asStorage vMotion, creating or deleting VMDK files, or powering off or on of virtualmachines.

Large Scale Simultaneous vMotion with Hardware-assisted LockingHardware-assisted locking reduces the time for vMotion to perform a large-scaleoff-loading of VMFS metadata protection to Hitachi Unified Storage. With shortertimes for vMotion, there can be shorter maintenance window times.

Table 7. Thin Provisioned and Primitive Conditions on Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning

PrimitiveCondition

Thin VMDK LazyzerothickVMDK

EeagerzerothickVMDK

VAAI-ON Thin Provisioned Thin Provisioned Thin Provisioned

VAAI-OFF Thin Provisioned Thin Provisioned Thick Provisioned


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Thin Provisioning Stun Testing with Thin Provisioning Stun showed the following:

The thin provisioning stun primitive enables resumption of activity even if storage is full.

TP Stun is recommended to be turned on in all cases where data integrityis highly critical to avoid potential data loss.

Setting the storage depletion alert appropriately can give you the flexibilityto recover from large scale storage growth issues.

Configure early alerting to ensure capture of potential issues as early aspossible.


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Complete Test Results These are the results from validation testing.

Cloning with Full Copy

Figure 9 shows the time it took to complete the cloning with VAAI enabled anddisabled.

Figure 9

With VAAI disabled, the 30 GB lazyzeroedthick virtual machine cloning taskfinished in 42 seconds. With VAAI enabled, the 30 GB lazyzeroedthick virtualmachine cloning task finished in 36 seconds, a 14.29 percent decrease.

With VAAI disabled, the 30 GB eagerzeroedthick virtual machine cloning taskfinished in 94 seconds. With VAAI enabled, the 30 GB eagerzeroedthick virtualmachine cloning task finished in 94 seconds, a 0 percent decrease.

With VAAI disabled, the 30 GB Thin VM cloning task finished in 90 seconds. WithVAAI enabled, the 30 GB Thin VM cloning task finished in 65 seconds, a 27.78percent decrease.

Lazyzeroedthick is the fastest to provision.


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Figure 10 has the results of the full copy tests showing the number of IOPSconsumed, which was captured on the ESX host HBA.

Figure 10

Figure 10 shows that the full copy primitive reduced the number of IOPSconsumed by the host HBA by more than 90 percent.

With VAAI enabled, nearly all of the IOPS from the cloning process were off-loaded from the ESX hosts to the storage system. With VAAI disabled, testingshowed a prolonged spike in the number of IOPS on the ESX host.


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Figure 11 shows the total IOPS consumed amongst all the tests.

Figure 11


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Figure 12 shows the cloning process consumed 92% less IO with full copyprimitive enabled.

Figure 12


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These are the results of the block zeroing disk utilization testing.

Provision a Fresh Dynamically Provisioned VolumeAs the storage is provisioned on the LUN by the controller and with the selectionof eagerzeroedthick made on the ESX host, the only way that the SAN canprovision this as thin is if the host communicates using VAAI to inform HitachiUnified Storage that the VMDK itself is empty. Figure 13 and Figure 14 shows this.

Figure 13

Figure 14


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Figure 16 show that, if eagerzeroedthick is used in conjunction with VAAI on andHitachi Unified Storage, the following is true:

Automatic thin provisioning from the SAN is kept to a minimum

IOPS are 100% immediately available with no loss in performance

Both thin and lazyzeroedthick virtual disks have warm-up overhead at initial write,which creates the overhead and latency seen in Figure 17 and Figure 18 .

Thin virtual disks have higher warm-up overhead compared to lazyzeroedthickvirtual disks. However, thin virtual disks are more than 2.5 times faster tocomplete zeroing of the blocks, when compared to lazyzeroedthick virtual disks.

The zeroing of blocks is off-loaded to Hitachi Unified Storage through theintegration of VAAI block zeroing primitive.

Once blocks for virtual disks are zeroed, there is no performance penalty. Overtime, thin, lazyzeroedthick, and eagerzeroedthick virtual disk have equalperformance characteristics.

With VAAI on and off thin comes in second as its IOPS stabilized in less than 23minutes. Its latency was less than 1 millisecond within 9 minutes of testing asseen in Figure 17 .

Figure 17


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Due to the overhead and latency created by the double write, lazyzeroedthickwarm up testing had to go on for a much longer duration than any of the otherformatting options. Figure 18 and Figure 19 show this. Compare this to the resultsin Figure 16 and Figure 17 .

Figure 18

Figure 19

Block Zeroing with Zero Page ReclaimAfter the zero page reclaim operation ran, 92 GB of the dynamic provisioning poolspace was freed. As a result, after the zero page reclaim operation, the virtualmachine was still allocated the original 100 GB but only 8 GB of space was beingconsumed on the storage system by the virtual machine.


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Provisioning time was captured using the vSphere client. Figure 20 shows thatwith VAAI enabled, the time required to provision a 30 GB eagerzeroedthickVMDK file is reduced by 85 percent.

Figure 20

Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assistedLockingFigure 21 shows that enabling VAAI, power on time decreased by 3.8 percentwhen using the datastore on the 24-spindle dynamic provisioning pool. Itdecreased by 10 percent when using the datastore on the 8-spindle dynamicprovisioning pool.

Figure 21


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With VAAI enabled, Figure 22 shows the number of SCSI locking conflictsdecreased by 100 percent for the datastore on the 24-spindle dynamicprovisioning pool. The conflicts decreased by 99.27 percent for the datastore onthe 8-spindle dynamic provisioning pool.

Figure 22


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Large Scale Boot Storm with Hardware-assistedLockingFigure 23 shows the reduction in to time required to move the virtual machinesfrom each host was by up to 34 percent with VAAI enabled.

Figure 23

The use of the hardware-assisted locking primitive reduced the migration timesand minimizes maintenance cycles by accelerating vMotion process. In turn thislimits downtime and expedites IT operations.

Thin Provisioning StunWith the VAAI on and with storage becoming depleted on the SAN, the alerts seenin Figure 24 can be sent to the administrator using email or console logging.

Figure 24


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When conducting the thin provisioning stun API primitive testing, an over-provisioned Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning pool filled to capacity sends an alert firstto the administrative console. Then, when the consumed capacity overtakes thealert threshold, the virtual machine displays the dialog box in Figure 25 suggesting that you free disk space and retry.

Figure 25

If the space condition is rectified, then clicking the Retry option results in theresumption of all I/O writes and reads within the given virtual machine.


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Additional Information about VMwarevStorage APIs for Array Integration

This is additional information about the VMware vStorage APIs.

Full CopyHitachi Unified Storage uses VAAI to offload the cloning process of a virtualmachine (or thousands of virtual machines in virtual desktop environments) fromthe ESX host when provisioning virtual machines or migrating VMDK filesbetween datastores within a storage system using Storage vMotion. The followingoperations are some examples of when the full copy primitive is used:

Virtual m achine provisioning The source and destination locations arewithin the same volume. Hitachi integrates with the full copy API to cloneVMs or datastores from a golden image. This process dramaticallyreduces I/O between the ESX nodes and Hitachi storage.

Storage vMotion The source and destination locations are on differentvolumes within the same storage system. This feature enables VMDK filesto be relocated between datastores within a storage system. Virtualmachines can be migrated to facilitate load-balancing or plannedmaintenance while maintaining availability. By integrating with full copy,host I/O offload for Storage vMotion operations accelerates virtual machinemigration times considerably.

Figure 26 shows a comparison of copy functions with and without VAAI.

Figure 26


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The full copy primitive enables an ESX host to initiate the copying of a VMDK between a source datastore location and a destination datastore location withinthe storage system rather than between the host and the storage system. Thisreduces the number of read and write operations from the ESX host, and reduceshost-side I/O bandwidth when copying virtual machines.

Block ZeroingA common operation when creating new virtual machines or virtual disks is toallocate space when creating the virtual machine or virtual disk.

When using the lazyzeroedthick format, the virtual disk size is pre-allocated butnot all of the space is pre-zeroed. As the guest operating system writes to thevirtual disk, the space is zeroed as needed.

When using the eagerzeroedthick format, the virtual disk size is pre-allocated andthe space is pre-zeroed. This means that it can take much longer to provisioneagerzeroedthick virtual disks. With the block zeroing primitive, these zeroingoperations take place within the storage system without the host having to issuemultiple commands.

Figure 27 shows a comparison of block zeroing with and without VAAI.

Figure 27

Integration with the block zeroing primitive allows the quick provisioning of eagerzeroedthick or lazyzeroedthick VMDKs by writing zeros across hundreds orthousands of blocks on the VMFS datastores. This off-loads much of the processfrom the ESX hosts to the storage system. This is particularly useful whenprovisioning eagerzeroedthick VMDKs for VMware fault tolerant virtual machinesdue to the large number of blocks that need to be zeroed.


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Note Block zeroing defaults to 1 MB blocks on vSphere 5 with VMDK version 5.Any touched blocks on the LUN are in 1 MB increments

Hardware-assisted LockingIntegration with the hardware-assisted locking primitive provides a more granularLUN locking. It allows the ability to modify a logical block address atomically onvirtual disk without the use of SCSI reservations or the need to lock the LUN fromother hosts.

Figure 28 shows a comparison of hardware-assisted locking with and withoutVAAI.

Figure 28

ESX 5.0 environments rely on locking mechanisms to protect VMFS metadata,particularly in clustered environments where multiple ESX hosts access the sameLUN. ESX uses SCSI reservations to prevent hosts from activating or sharingvirtual disk content on multiple hosts at the same time.

However, these SCSI locking algorithms lock an entire LUN and do not providethe granularity to lock a particular block on the LUN. This algorithm requires fourseparate commands (simplified as reserve, read, write and release) to acquire a

lock. Locking the entire LUN also can introduce SCSI reservation conflicts andaffect scalability.

Transferring the LUN locking process to Hitachi Unified Storage reduces thenumber of commands required to access a lock and allows more granular locking.

This leads to better overall performance and increases the number of virtualmachines per datastore and the number of hosts accessing the datastore.


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For More InformationHitachi Data Systems Global Services offers experienced storage consultants,proven methodologies and a comprehensive services portfolio to assist you inimplementing Hitachi products and solutions in your environment. For moreinformation, see the Hitachi Data Systems Global Services website.

Live and recorded product demonstrations are available for many Hitachiproducts. To schedule a live demonstration, contact a sales representative. Toview a recorded demonstration, see the Hitachi Data Systems CorporateResources website. Click the Product Demos tab for a list of available recordeddemonstrations.

Hitachi Data Systems Academy provides best-in-class training on Hitachiproducts, technology, solutions and certifications. Hitachi Data Systems Academydelivers on-demand web-based training (WBT), classroom-based instructor-ledtraining (ILT) and virtual instructor-led training (vILT) courses. For moreinformation, see the Hitachi Data Systems Services Education website.

For more information about Hitachi products and services, contact your salesrepresentative or channel partner or visit the Hitachi Data Systems website.
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