Provisioning EMC Symmetrix VMAXe Storage for VMware ... Paper... · 4 Provisioning EMC Symmetrix VMAXe Storage for VMware vSphere Environments Executive summary VMware vSphere™

White Paper

Abstract

This white paper describes the features of EMC’s new Symmetrix VMAXe™ storage system and the easy-to-use management and provisioning capabilities that enable customers to provision storage easily in VMware vSphere™ environments. June 2011

PROVISIONING EMC SYMMETRIX VMAXe STORAGE FOR VMWARE vSPHERE ENVIRONMENTS Applied Technology

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Provisioning EMC Symmetrix VMAXe Storage for VMware vSphere Environments

Copyright © 2011 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. The information in this publication is provided “as is.” EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. VMware, ESX, ESXi, VMotion, VMware vCenter, and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Part Number h8261.1

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Table of Contents

Executive summary.................................................................................................. 4

Purpose .............................................................................................................................. 4

Audience ............................................................................................................................ 4

The Symmetrix VMAXe ............................................................................................. 5

Symmetrix VMAXe features ...................................................................................... 6

Enginuity operating environment ........................................................................................ 6

Host connections and expansion ........................................................................................ 6

Storage provisioning .......................................................................................................... 6

Data protection and integrity .............................................................................................. 6

System security .................................................................................................................. 7

Performance ....................................................................................................................... 7

Storage management tools ................................................................................................. 7

Symmetrix Management Console ................................................................................... 8

EMC Ionix ControlCenter ................................................................................................. 8

Solutions Enabler ........................................................................................................... 8

System availability ............................................................................................................. 8

Reallocation and configuration ........................................................................................... 9

Data migration ................................................................................................................... 9

VMware vSphere overview ....................................................................................... 9

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator ............................................................................... 12

Provisioning storage from a Symmetrix VMAXe system to a virtualized data center .. 12

VMware vSphere 4 ........................................................................................................... 13

Provisioning Symmetrix VMAXe storage ............................................................................ 13

Adding storage to existing vSphere deployments on VMAXe ............................................. 24

Datastores and virtual machines ...................................................................................... 25

Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 27

References ............................................................................................................ 27

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Executive summary VMware vSphere™ 4 aggregates and manages large pools of infrastructure— processors, storage, and networking—as a seamless, flexible, and dynamic operating environment. For end users, VMware® vSphere 4 brings the power of cloud computing to the data center, reducing IT costs while also increasing infrastructure efficacy. For hosting service providers, VMware vSphere 4 enables a more economic and efficient path to delivering cloud services that are compatible with customers’ internal cloud infrastructures. VMware vSphere 4 delivers significant performance and scalability to enable the most resource-intensive applications, such as large databases, to be deployed on internal clouds. With these performance and scalability features, VMware vSphere 4 can enable a 100 percent virtualized internal cloud.

The EMC® Symmetrix VMAXe™, a new system in the Symmetrix VMAX® family, is a natural fit for virtualized environments. The system leverages the Virtual Matrix Architecture™ and integrates industry-standard components with unique EMC Symmetrix® capabilities to deliver scalable performance and Tier 1 reliability in storage systems that can scale up to four engines and several hundred drives, hundreds of terabytes of storage, and thousands of VMware virtual machines in a single federated storage infrastructure. The Symmetrix VMAXe architecture combines the performance and efficiency of a scale-up architecture, the cost-effective flexibility of a scale-out architecture, and a simple management interface for provisioning storage in virtualized environments. Combined with the latest generation Enterprise Flash, Fibre Channel, and SATA drives, the Symmetrix VMAXe system allows users to provision storage to VMware vSphere environments with just a few clicks. This flexibility also allows users to cost-effectively meet the widest range of storage requirements for the performance and capacity needs of a virtualized environment hosting a wide variety of virtualized applications. VMware vCenter™ Server is similarly designed to handle very large IT environments. A single instance of vCenter Server manages up to 300 ESX® hosts and 3,000 virtual machines, providing the virtual foundation to leverage the capabilities of storage arrays like the EMC Symmetrix VMAXe.

Purpose

The purpose of this white paper is to illustrate the ease-of-use features of the EMC Symmetrix VMAXe system and outline a step-by-step procedure for provisioning storage in a virtualized environment with VMware vSphere 4.

Audience

This white paper is intended for VMware administrators, server administrators, and storage administrators responsible for creating, managing, and consuming storage objects, as well as their underlying storage devices, for their VMware vSphere environments attached to an EMC Symmetrix VMAXe storage array. The white paper

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assumes the reader is familiar with VMware technology, EMC Symmetrix, and related software.

The Symmetrix VMAXe EMC Symmetrix VMAXe with Enginuity™ is a multicontroller, scale-out architecture with consolidation and efficiency for the enterprise with one to four system bays (one to four VMAXe Engines) and up to two storage bays. The system scales from a single engine (in one system bay) with no storage bays to four engines (in four system bays) with two additional storage bays, as shown in Figure 1. The system can be upgraded by adding engines, memory (by adding engines), or disk array enclosures (DAEs). Each DAE contains 15 physical drives. DAEs are added in increments of four. Each engine is housed in a system bay, and contains two directors with extensive CPU processing power, physical memory, front-end ports, and back-end ports.

Figure 1. Symmetrix VMAXe maximum configuration

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Symmetrix VMAXe features This section provides an overview of Symmetrix VMAXe features.

Availability features

Symmetrix VMAXe availability features ensure uninterrupted access to mission-critical data and applications. Some of the most prominent features include:

A full suite of redundant hardware components

Redundant internal and external communication paths

Transparent failover and failback

Simplified component design, minimizing failure points and providing transparent component maintenance

Enginuity operating environment

The Enginuity operating environment for Symmetrix is installed on the Symmetrix VMAXe. Enginuity provides services and features that:

Manage system resources to optimize performance across a wide range of I/O profiles

Ensure data integrity and data availability through advanced fault monitoring, detection, and correction capabilities

Provide uniform access through APIs for internal calls and offer an external interface to allow integration with other software providers

Support simplified storage management and provisioning

Host connections and expansion

The Symmetrix VMAXe supports connections to open systems hosts over Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and iSCSI. Host ports reside on the front-end I/O modules. Back-end I/O modules provide redundant access to each drive.

Storage provisioning

The Symmetrix VMAXe provides simplified storage management and provisioning, as well as replication, migration, and volume configuration options via bundled software offerings including Virtual LUN VP mobility and Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP).

Data protection and integrity

The Symmetrix VMAXe has several data protection and integrity features. Data protection features include RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 6 at the drive level, EMC TimeFinder® for local replication and backup, and RecoverPoint/EX for remote data protection. Features such as vaulting and cache integrity checks protect data in the

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event of an unexpected power loss as well as ensure the integrity of cache data by checking and monitoring cache hardware components.

System security

The Symmetrix VMAXe provides industry-leading security features that protect your system and data from unauthorized users. These include:

Ethernet support for the Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) protocol

Symmetrix Access Controls and user authorization, to authenticate users and ensure access to only approved hosts

EMC Symmetrix Service Credential, secured by RSA, to provide service user passwords and encrypted credentials that vary by user, action, system, and time

Symmetrix audit log support, including records of host-initiated actions, service processor actions, and attempts blocked by security controls

EMC Certified Data Erasure for Symmetrix disks, which ensures the safe removal of data from failed and removed disks

Performance

The Symmetrix VMAXe delivers scalable performance that meets the most demanding access, protection, and distribution requirements. Performance features include:

A redundant Virtual Matrix Architecture that provides fast, reliable communication among directors

High-performance director engines running at a maximum of 2.4 GHz with scalable memory

Algorithmic intelligence that reduces processing overhead, delivers improved throughput and performance, and allows customizable priorities for Symmetrix VMAXe operations

Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) technology that delivers the ultimate performance with the lowest latencies

Tools for tiered storage optimization, including Symmetrix Performance Analyzer and Dynamic Cache Partitioning

Storage management tools

The Symmetrix VMAXe can be managed with the following tools:

Symmetrix Management Console — The primary interface for managing Symmetrix arrays

EMC Ionix™ ControlCenter® (formerly EMC ControlCenter) — An intuitive, browser-based family of products that provides management of the overall storage environment, including multivendor storage reporting, monitoring, configuration, and control

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Solutions Enabler — A library of commands that are entered from a command line or from a script

Symmetrix Management Console

Symmetrix Management Console (SMC) is an intuitive, browser-based user interface that configures and manages Symmetrix VMAXe. SMC can be hosted on a Windows, UNIX, or Linux server or service processor with access through a Web browser or the Symmetrix service processor. It is also available as a virtual appliance that includes EMC Solutions Enabler and EMC Symmetrix Performance Analyzer. SMC is used to:

Discover Symmetrix VMAXe arrays

Perform configuration operations (create devices, map and mask devices, set Symmetrix VMAXe attributes, set device attributes, set port flags)

Manage devices (change device configuration, set device status, reserve devices, duplicate devices, create/dissolve meta devices)

Configure and manage storage tiering technologies such as FAST

Manage Symmetrix Access Controls, user accounts, and role-based access controls

Install customer-replaceable disk drives

Perform and monitor replication operations (TimeFinder for VMAXe, Open Replicator)

Monitor alerts and an application’s performance

EMC Ionix ControlCenter

EMC Ionix ControlCenter storage management software provides an end-to-end solution for multivendor storage reporting, monitoring, configuration, and control. ControlCenter consists of core infrastructure components (providing basic scalability, usability, and information sharing) coupled with a set of ControlCenter licensed applications and license packages that ensure the appropriate level of management and control over your environment.

The EMC Ionix ControlCenter Planning and Installation Guide, Volume 1 provides detailed information about ControlCenter.

Solutions Enabler

Solutions Enabler is a specialized library consisting of commands that can be invoked on the command line or from within scripts. Solutions Enabler commands can be used to monitor device configuration and status and perform control operations on devices and data objects within your managed storage complex.

System availability

The Symmetrix VMAXe provides five 9s availability using nondisruptive maintenance procedures and built-in redundancy. Nondisruptive procedures allow new software

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installation, system maintenance, Symmetrix VMAXe reconfiguration, and Enginuity upgrades with little or no impact to business activities.

Reallocation and configuration

The Symmetrix VMAXe provides nondisruptive device reallocation and configuration changes that allow system modification and expansion without impact to daily operation.

Data migration

The Symmetrix VMAXe performs data migration functions using technologies such as Federated Live Migration (FLM), EMC Open Replicator for Symmetrix (ORS), and EMC Open Migrator/Live Migration. Each of these migration technologies is easy to use and supports different customer use cases.

VMware vSphere overview The VMware vSphere virtualization suite consists of various components including ESX/ESXi™ hosts, vCenter Server, vSphere Client, vSphere web access, and vSphere SDK. In addition, VMware vSphere offers a set of distributed services including distributed resource scheduling, high availability, and consolidated backup. VMware vSphere virtualizes the entire IT infrastructure including servers, storage, and networks. VMware vSphere aggregates these resources and presents a uniform set of elements in the virtual environment (Figure 2). With VMware vSphere, one can manage IT resources like a shared utility and dynamically provision resources to different business units and projects.

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Figure 2. VMware vSphere 4 architecture

Using vCenter Server, key elements like hosts, clusters, resource pools, datastores, networks, and virtual machines can be viewed, configured, and managed. vCenter Server aggregates physical resources from multiple ESX/ESXi hosts and presents a central collection of simple and flexible resources for the system administrator to provision to virtual machines in the virtual environment.

vCenter Server has the following characteristics:

Centralized management: vCenter Server allows IT organizations to organize, rapidly provision, and configure the entire IT environment through a single interface, resulting in lower operating costs. Thorough and consistent performance monitoring of all critical components—including CPU, memory, storage and networking—provide the detail administrators need.

Operational automation: Task scheduling and alerting improve responsiveness to business needs and prioritize actions requiring the most urgent attention.

Secure access control: Robust permission mechanisms and integration with Microsoft Active Directory guarantee authorized access to an environment and its virtual machines. Responsibilities can be delegated to tiers of system administrators.

Availability and resource management: From VMware vCenter Server, administrators can configure and manage VMware vMotion®, Storage vMotion, VMware High Availability (HA), and Fault Tolerance.

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Higher levels of security: Enforced compliance with patch standards automatically through VMware vCenter Update Manager allows organizations to protect their virtual infrastructure from vulnerabilities.

Automated energy efficiency: Enterprises can minimize power consumption with VMware Distributed Power Management, which enables a “green” data center.

vSphere uses the VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) to store virtual machines. VMware VMFS is a high-performance cluster file system that provides storage virtualization that is optimized for virtual machines. Each virtual machine is encapsulated in a distinct set of files; VMFS is the default storage management interface for these files on physical disks and partitions.

VMFS allows for simplified virtual machine provisioning by efficiently storing the entire machine state in a central location, while also allowing multiple ESX host servers to access shared virtual machine storage concurrently. Additionally, VMFS enables virtualization-based distributed infrastructure services that provide a groundwork that allows the scaling of virtualization beyond the confines of a single system. VMFS further simplifies environments by providing a model to allocate storage space to the individual virtual machines without exposing them to the complexity of the physical storage technologies such as Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI SAN, direct-attached storage, and NAS.

Key features in VMware vSphere 4 are:

VMware DRS dynamically load balances server resources to deliver the right resource to the right application based on business priority; allowing applications to shrink and grow as needed.

Pluggable Storage Architecture allows for third-party multipathing software to be loaded in to the ESX kernel to better leverage parallel storage connectivity.

Hot add enables CPU and memory to be added to virtual machines when needed without disruption or downtime.

Hot plug enables virtual storage and network devices to be added to or removed from virtual machines without disruption or downtime.

Hot extend of virtual disks allows virtual storage to be added to running virtual machines without disruption or downtime.

VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch simplifies and enhances the provisioning, administration, and control of virtual machine networking in VMware vSphere environments. It also enables third-party distributed virtual switches such as the Cisco Nexus 1000v to be used in vSphere environments, providing network administrators with familiar interfaces to control quality of service at the virtual machine level.

VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning provides dynamic allocation of storage capacity, allowing storage to be leveraged at a much higher efficiency.

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VMware vMotion eliminates the need to schedule application downtime due to scheduled server maintenance through live migration of virtual machines across servers with no disruption to users or loss of service.

VMware Storage vMotion eliminates the need to schedule application downtime due to planned storage maintenance or during storage migrations by enabling live migration of virtual machine disks with no disruption to users or loss of service.

VMware High Availability (HA) provides cost-effective, automated restart within minutes for all applications in the event of hardware or operating system failures.

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability, without any data loss or downtime, to any application, in the event of hardware failures.

VMFS Volume Grow allows for a nondisruptive VMFS volume grow to fill a storage device that has been increased in size since the datastore was originally created on it.

vStorage API for Array integration provides capabilities that leverage new protocol interfaces between VMware and storage arrays for faster performance of vSphere operations such as Storage vMotion events and virtual machine provisioning

For a more detailed listing of important benefits and features of VMware vSphere 4, please refer to the VMware vSphere 4 Key Features and Benefits document available at http://www.vmware.com.

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) for VMware vSphere is a plug-in to VMware’s vCenter Server that provides a single management interface for managing EMC storage within the vSphere environment. Features can be added and removed from VSI independently, providing flexibility for customizing VSI user environments using the VSI Feature Manager. VSI provides a unified user experience, allowing each feature to be updated independently, and new features1 to be introduced rapidly in response to changing customer requirements. Current features available for VSI are Storage Viewer (SV), Path Management, Storage Pool Management (SPM), Symmetrix SRA Utilities, and Unified Storage Management. It is highly recommended that customers use the EMC VSI plug-in as it is an easy-to-use interface that provides an insight to the EMC storage environment in vSphere.

Provisioning storage from a Symmetrix VMAXe system to a virtualized data center The following sections describe the simple process required for setting up and provisioning storage from a Symmetrix VMAXe to VMware vSphere 4 environments.

1 Not all features in EMC VSI are supported with Symmetrix VMAXe. Customers should refer to Release Notes for supported features.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/key_features_vsphere.pdf

http://www.vmware.com/

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VMware vSphere 4

The typical components of a virtual infrastructure are servers that are used to host VMware vSphere 4 components such as ESX servers, vCenter Server, and vSphere Client. The ESX servers are used to host virtual machines and vCenter Server is used to manage the vSphere environment. In addition there are servers that host the infrastructure components of a virtualized data center. The following sections assume that customers have already set up a virtualization infrastructure with all of the components mentioned above.

Provisioning Symmetrix VMAXe storage

To host a virtualized environment with VMware vSphere 4 customers not only need servers but also need access to storage. Storage in vSphere 4 environments is used for hosting/storing virtual machines as well as provisioning virtual disks to virtual machines. The EMC Symmetrix VMAXe is an enterprise-class storage array that fits well in vSphere 4 environments and offers various features and capabilities that seamlessly integrate into vSphere environments. Since storage is a critical piece of any vSphere 4 environment, it is very important to have the ability to configure and provision storage with ease. This section describes the series of steps that are involved in setting up storage on the VMAXe storage system as well as presenting it to the virtualized environment.

Setting up and provisioning storage in a vSphere environment with the Symmetrix VMAXe system is a very simple process. Either the EMC Symmetrix Management Console (SMC) or EMC Solutions Enabler can be used to set up and provision storage to a vSphere environment. To illustrate the ease of use and simplicity of provisioning storage, the rest of the discussion will focus on the use of SMC. It is assumed that end users have SMC installed on either a VM/host or the VMAXe service processor (SP) and have the necessary gatekeepers mapped for using SMC.

Once the SMC service is available, the setup is ready for provisioning storage to the ESX servers in the vSphere environment. Customers should follow the step-by-step procedure below to provision and present storage from the Symmetrix VMAXe system.

The starting point for configuring and provisioning storage is the right-hand pane of the SMC dashboard (Figure 3) that consists of a set of icons labeled Common Tasks.

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Figure 3. SMC dashboard with right-hand pane showing Common Tasks

Before we begin the actual procedure of configuring and provisioning storage, an important attribute has to be set in the Symmetrix VMAXe properties. The following procedure explains how to configure and provision storage from a Symmetrix VMAXe system to the ESX server hosts in the ESX cluster.

1. The first step is to enable the Auto Meta device configuration attribute using SMC. Auto Meta is an ease-of-use function that helps in provisioning devices to a vSphere environment. In vSphere environments, devices are usually presented to the ESX hosts as a single large LUN. The Symmetrix VMAXe has a size limit of 240 GB on each volume. However, users can create devices of a size greater than 240 GB by grouping several devices together into what is called a metavolume. Enabling Auto Meta ensures that a large metavolume is created when requested storage allocations exceed the 240 GB limit. This large metavolume can then be presented to the ESX host. Auto Meta configuration is enabled by browsing to the Properties tab in SMC, selecting the VMAXe array, and then right-clicking and selecting Symmetrix Admin > Set Symmetrix Attributes. Users should select the Auto Meta checkbox in the dialog box that appears.

An example of enabling Auto Meta configuration is shown in Figure 4. In this particular example we chose a striped configuration for the metavolume as well as

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specified the minimum Auto Meta device size as 240 GB (entered in the GUI as 262669 cylinders with the cylinder size equal to 960 bytes) along with a member size of 128 GB. For this study, the configuration change was executed on the Symmetrix VMAXe system using the default values. Users should choose the Auto Meta device configuration that is appropriate for their environment.

Figure 4. Dialog box for enabling Auto Meta device configuration

2. Create thin pools from the available storage drive types on the VMAXe system. When the VMAXe is shipped from EMC, it is already preconfigured with data devices (TDAT) based on the customer specification of drive types and RAID protection types. A thin pool is a collection of these data devices. The data devices are created with a particular storage drive technology such as EFD, FC, or SATA and a particular protection type such as RAID 5 (3+1). An example of a Symmetrix VMAXe system with various data devices that are preconfigured and ready to use is shown in Figure 5.

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Figure 5. SMC example showing pre-created data devices for use in thin pools

To illustrate the creation of thin pools from preconfigured data devices on a Symmetrix VMAXe system, we created three thin pools named EFD_VP, FC_VP, and SATA_VP from storage drive types Enterprise Flash, Fibre Channel, and SATA, respectively. The pools were created with the following capacities to maximize use of storage that is available in each storage drive type.

EFD_VP – 550 GB RAID 5 (3+1) thin pool with 200 GB Flash drives

FC_VP – 26387 GB RAID 5 (3+1) thin pool with 450 GB 15k rpm Fibre Channel drives

SATA_VP – 21040 GB RAID 6 (6+2) thin pool with 2 TB 7.2k rpm SATA drives

To create thin pools, users need to select the Create Thin Pool in the Common Tasks of the SMC Dashboard. The number and size of data devices are automatically calculated based on the existing preconfigured data devices in the VMAXe. Figure 6 shows the steps for creating the thin pool EFD_VP. Figure 7 on page 18 shows the various thin pools that were created along with their sizes on the VMAXe system.

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Figure 6. Procedure to show the creation of a thin pool named EFD_VP using SMC

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Figure 7. SMC example showing the three pools EFD_VP, FC_VP, and SATA_VP

Users should create thin pools that are appropriate for their environment using the procedure described in this step.

3. SMC offers an easy way to create host-accessible devices through the use of device templates. In this step we illustrate the creation of device templates that will later be used to provision storage to the ESX hosts in the vSphere environment. As an example to illustrate the creation of thin devices, we created three device templates, one per thin pool created in step 2 above. To create a template, select the Tasks tab of SMC and the Manage Storage Templates hyperlink listed under the heading Templates and Preferences. The details of the device templates are shown in the following table.

Figure 8 shows the creation of the EFDTemplate, and Figure 9 shows the list of all available device templates with the capacities. Users should create thin pools based on their usage requirements and based on the storage capacities their environment can support.

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Table 1. List of thin pools with names and capacities

Template Name Pool Name Device Capacity

EFDTemplate EFD_VP 512 GB

FCTemplate FC_VP 1024 GB

SATATemplate SATA_VP 2048 GB

Figure 8. Device specification for EFDTemplate in the device pool EFD_VP

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Figure 9. SMC Template Manager showing all three device templates

4. The final step is to present storage and make it visible to the ESX hosts. This step

is performed by the selecting the Add New Host icon in the SMC dashboard. Before beginning this step, users should note the World Wide Name (WWN) of the host bus adapters (HBA) on each of the ESX hosts. This information is available in vCenter. The EMC VSI plug-in for vCenter is an easy-to-use mechanism to display and manage the properties of storage attached to vSphere. Figure 10 shows HBA information in the EMC VSI tab of vCenter. Using this information, users can proceed to the Add New Host procedure in the SMC. As part of the same step users can also map storage to the ESX hosts.

In the following example we added two ESX hosts that belonged to a cluster by selecting and adding the initiators of both hosts in SMC. We also added a device as part of this step by using the EFDTemplate created in step 3. The result of this step is that the device is accessible from both hosts of the ESX cluster.

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Figure 10. vCenter with EMC VSI showing the WWN of HBAs on one of the ESX hosts in a cluster

Figure 11 shows the summary of the Add Host and Provision Virtual Storage wizard. It can be seen that all four initiators that belong to two ESX hosts are selected, and that the four ports on the front of the VMAXe are selected as well as a device of 512 GB is created from the template EFDTemplate.

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Figure 11. Summary of the Add New Host and Provision Virtual Storage wizard

After the user clicks Finish in the dialog box above, SMC creates a masking view and the appropriate objects such as the initiator group, port group, and storage group and adds the device that is created from the template into the storage group. It can be seen in Figure 12 that a masking view called VirtualCluster_MV was created along with the VirtualCluster_IG initiator group, VirtualCluster_PG port group, and VirtualCluster_SG storage group. The 512 GB device that was created as part of this step is visible in the vSphere Client after users have performed a Rescan All operation in the storage adapter link under the configuration tab. Figure 13 shows the storage device with 512 GB capacity on one of the ESX hosts.

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Figure 12. Final output of the Add New Host and Provision Virtual Storage wizard

Figure 13. vCenter output showing the newly created 512 GB device

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From this example it is very clear that provisioning storage from an EMC Symmetrix VMAXe storage array to a vSphere environment is a simple four-step procedure. Customers can now leverage the storage that has been provisioned to the ESX hosts and create datastores for their vSphere environment.

Adding storage to existing vSphere deployments on VMAXe

As virtualized environments scale over time due to changing business requirements, the storage system should have the ability to accommodate additional storage requirements from hosts. Adding storage to the ESX hosts in a vSphere environment can be accomplished by using the Expand Storage for a Host wizard in the SMC dashboard. To illustrate the procedure to add additional storage to ESX hosts, we used the Expand storage for a host option to create two additional devices with the capacities 1024 GB and 2048 GB. The 1024 GB device was created using the FCTemplate, and the 2048 GB device was created using the SATATemplate. Figure 14 represents the final step before the user initiates a configuration session to create a device of 1024 GB from FCTemplate. On clicking the Finish button shown in the figure, SMC working in conjunction with the Enginuity operating environment creates the appropriate device and adds it to the VirtualCluster_SG storage group that was created earlier. The newly created devices will be visible to the ESX hosts once a Rescan All operation has been performed on every storage adapter on the ESX hosts.

Figure 14. vCenter output showing the newly created 512 GB device

As illustrated above, it is simple and easy to provision additional storage from a Symmetrix VMAXe to vSphere environments. If one needs to grow their environment and provision additional storage, the procedure above can easily handle growing storage needs for the vSphere environment.

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Datastores and virtual machines

After storage has been created and provisioned from a VMAXe system to the vSphere environment, datastores should be created on these devices to host virtual machines (VMs)and other vSphere objects.

Figure 15 shows an example of three datastores with the names EFDdatastore, FCdatastore, and SATAdatastore that were created on devices described in previous sections. These three datastores can be used to host virtual machines with various service-level agreement (SLA) requirements as well as to provision storage in the form of virtual disks to each virtual machine. Figure 15 shows the datastores in vCenter.

Figure 15. vCenter output showing 3 datastores mapped to 3 VMAXe devices

To illustrate the creation of virtual machines using datastores, we created three virtual machines named GoldVM, SilverVM, and BronzeVM that reside on EFDdatastore, FCdatastore, and SATAdatastore, respectively.

Figure 16 shows a snapshot of the VMs. Most customer environments have different SLA requirements for the virtual machines that are part of the data center infrastructure. For example, some VMs may require access to Flash storage, which offers low latency for certain type of workloads, whereas other VMs may require more capacity, and yet another set of VMs may require a combination of capacity and good latency. To accommodate and illustrate the requirements discussed we created GoldVM on the EFDdatastore, SilverVM on the FCdatastore, and BronzeVM on the SATAdatastore. GoldVM can support applications that have very low latency

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requirements since it is on a datastore that is resident on Enterprise Flash Drives on the VMAXe. Similarly SilverVM can support applications that need a good balance between latency and capacity as it is on a datastore that resides on Fibre Channel drives and BronzeVM can support applications that need storage density since it is on a datastore that resides on SATA drives that offer high density characteristics.

Symmetrix VMAXe supports FAST VP, which automates the movement of data between tiers based on access patterns on various tiers of storage. FAST VP is very helpful in vSphere environments where there are different types of VMs like the ones listed in the example above on a single datastore. By automating the movement of the VMs’ data to various tiers based on the I/O and storage requirements of the VMs FAST VP can simplify the arduous task of associating a VM statically to a datastore hosted on a specific drive type. Users can use the procedure and examples as a guideline to provision additional datastores, VMs, and virtual disks to VMs.

Figure 16. vCenter output of the 3 different VMs next to their corresponding datastores

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Conclusion This white paper demonstrates the ease-of-use capabilities of the EMC Symmetrix VMAXe storage system in VMware vSphere environments. Provisioning storage to a virtualized environment with VMware vSphere 4 is a simple four-step procedure. The VMAXe is the ideal storage system and a natural fit for use in virtualized environments with VMware vSphere 4.

References The following documentation can provide more information:

VMware vSphere 4 Key Features and Benefits

VMware vSphere 4 Documentation

EMC Ionix ControlCenter page on EMC.com

Using EMC Symmetrix Storage in VMware vSphere Environments TechBook

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/key_features_vsphere.pdf

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vs_pubs.html

http://www.emc.com/products/series/ionix-storage-resource-management-suite.htm=

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/solution-overview/h2529-vmware-esx-svr-w-symmetrix-wp-ldv.pdf

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Provisioning EMC Symmetrix VMAXe Storage for VMware ... Paper... · 4 Provisioning EMC Symmetrix VMAXe Storage for VMware vSphere Environments Executive summary VMware vSphere™