No - I haven't. I don't have visibility into the vmware environment itself - I'm on the vmware team, but mostly just so I can give them more storage :) >From the storage side, things look good - this is the latency picture on one >of our vmware volumes (no idea if the picture will go through - if it doesn't, >it just shows that read or write latency rarely goes above 10ms): [cid:[email protected]] This filer is doing a lot (80,000+ home directories on node A and node B also hosts our departmental file shares, central webserver nfs mounts, online course file storage, etc as well as 3 nfs vmware datastores. The vmware datastores are on their own disks (3 shelves of 15K FC drives) and use their own nics (4 ports, 2 per router) - almost all the volumes on the filer are replicated (via snapmirror) every 4 hours to our secondary datacenter on campus.
We still have some VMs on the CX4 (VMs with RDMS, VMs that monitor the Netapps) and there are some things that would be easier to do on the CX4 like setting up a raid 10 set to dedicate to a datastore for a high IO DB but overall it has been a very positive move. mark From: Sean Martin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 1:22 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN Storage Mark, Have you noticed any performance differences moving from the CX4 to the NetApp? - Sean On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Weber, Mark A <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: The issue with thin provisioning with vmware is that you can't easily resize a vmfs volume - whereas if you are running with nfs as your datastore then you don't have that issue and can increase/decrease the size on the fly whenever you want. We just migrated around 200 vms from an EMC CX4-960 to our Netapp 3040 - for us the cost difference was significant because of two things - one, the Netapp gives us about 50% dedupe savings and two, the group that manages the Windows servers uses BESR (Backup Exec System Recovery) for DR. We removed the BESR licenses from all the Windows VMs on the Netapp now and just use array side snapshots. The savings due to BESR license costs alone nearly paid for our disk shelves on the Netapp. I would echo the comments about software/feature licensing - they can add up quickly. When you do get quotes, I would recommend you get itemized ones so you can actually compare apples to apples. It usually takes us several emails/calls to EMC/Netapp to get them to deliver the itemized costs. mark ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
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