As long as there is no vVol outthere i dont think its a good idea for creating an EQL Volume for each VM. Its a hell in management and you waste space in every Datastore for VM snapshots. Keep in mind that there is a max Datastore in vSphere, max. iSCSI Connection limit per Pool/Group which maybe you reach if you have 6 hosts with 50 volumes and 2 VMKs.
Your standard should be somethink like
- Multible 1TB EQL Volumes
- Some 2TB for the Fileserver VMDKs
- Maybe some XXX GB Volume with a RAID Preference if you would like to pin a volume on the Hybrid array.
If you have Enterprise Plus use the Datastore Cluster (manual Mode!) which help a lot. Think about if you can live with a setup like "VM with multible vDisks are stored on different Datastore" or if you need to keep all vDisk together. After we use sDRS Cluster for some time we let the system spread the vmdk over all datastores within a cluster which is very space efficient. Our limit is a 90% utilization based on your 2TB datastore. We need the rest for temp. snapshots (Dell vRanger).
For your information:
vSphere 5.x can support Volumes with >2TB (max 64TB) and with vSphere 5.5 also a VMDK can support up to 62TB in size
Next we do have Virtual Servers that are very busy, I did isolate them as both EQL smartcopy and VMware snapshots seem to fail constantly (I tried scheduling these at different times). If they are "combined" into large Volumes, I would find that VMware will seem to store the "in-complete snapshots" and the provisioned space would increase. I would have to manually remove the snapshots via VMware snapshot manager.
The thing is that we do not know how the Dell EQL smartcopy really works.
When we recover or "clone" a EQL snapshot, will we create another large volume ? So if the volume is like 4TiB and holds 5 Virtual Servers and all I need is to recover one of the Virtual Server...then how ? For a start, I have 21TiB available (approx 16TiB usable if considering space for snapshots). In the worse case scenario, I would need to "reserve" 4TiB if based on suggestion to create large volumes of 4TiB ?
I would also like to emphasize that snapshots and backups are for worse scenario cases and the EQL snapshot is by far the fastest method I have seen and used to recover a Virtual Server (I run smartcopy daily and hold only 5 copies). Anything else I rely on other backup software (once a week, mth etc).
Ah ok.. if you would like to use the smartcopy feature is looks different.
IIRC
1. VMDKs on different Datastores are not supportet
2. If you select a single VM for a smartcopy the entire Volume will always snapshotet
Quisced Snaps are always a problem. With vRanger we have a 98% success ratio for backups with the quiscing option set. Also the removing of a snap will not always works. But this is a problem in general which effect all backup products :(
Question:
If you have multible VMs in a Datastore and you try to snapshot the complete DS what happends if one of these produce an error? Will the entire process failed? If so i can understand that this is not an option.
Origin3k
4 Operator
•
2.4K Posts
1
January 13th, 2014 02:00
As long as there is no vVol outthere i dont think its a good idea for creating an EQL Volume for each VM. Its a hell in management and you waste space in every Datastore for VM snapshots. Keep in mind that there is a max Datastore in vSphere, max. iSCSI Connection limit per Pool/Group which maybe you reach if you have 6 hosts with 50 volumes and 2 VMKs.
Your standard should be somethink like
- Multible 1TB EQL Volumes
- Some 2TB for the Fileserver VMDKs
- Maybe some XXX GB Volume with a RAID Preference if you would like to pin a volume on the Hybrid array.
If you have Enterprise Plus use the Datastore Cluster (manual Mode!) which help a lot. Think about if you can live with a setup like "VM with multible vDisks are stored on different Datastore" or if you need to keep all vDisk together. After we use sDRS Cluster for some time we let the system spread the vmdk over all datastores within a cluster which is very space efficient. Our limit is a 90% utilization based on your 2TB datastore. We need the rest for temp. snapshots (Dell vRanger).
For your information:
vSphere 5.x can support Volumes with >2TB (max 64TB) and with vSphere 5.5 also a VMDK can support up to 62TB in size
Regards,
Joerg
zadrian
12 Posts
0
January 13th, 2014 03:00
Next we do have Virtual Servers that are very busy, I did isolate them as both EQL smartcopy and VMware snapshots seem to fail constantly (I tried scheduling these at different times). If they are "combined" into large Volumes, I would find that VMware will seem to store the "in-complete snapshots" and the provisioned space would increase. I would have to manually remove the snapshots via VMware snapshot manager.
zadrian
12 Posts
0
January 13th, 2014 03:00
The thing is that we do not know how the Dell EQL smartcopy really works.
When we recover or "clone" a EQL snapshot, will we create another large volume ? So if the volume is like 4TiB and holds 5 Virtual Servers and all I need is to recover one of the Virtual Server...then how ? For a start, I have 21TiB available (approx 16TiB usable if considering space for snapshots). In the worse case scenario, I would need to "reserve" 4TiB if based on suggestion to create large volumes of 4TiB ?
I would also like to emphasize that snapshots and backups are for worse scenario cases and the EQL snapshot is by far the fastest method I have seen and used to recover a Virtual Server (I run smartcopy daily and hold only 5 copies). Anything else I rely on other backup software (once a week, mth etc).
Origin3k
4 Operator
•
2.4K Posts
0
January 13th, 2014 05:00
Ah ok.. if you would like to use the smartcopy feature is looks different.
IIRC
1. VMDKs on different Datastores are not supportet
2. If you select a single VM for a smartcopy the entire Volume will always snapshotet
Quisced Snaps are always a problem. With vRanger we have a 98% success ratio for backups with the quiscing option set. Also the removing of a snap will not always works. But this is a problem in general which effect all backup products :(
Question:
If you have multible VMs in a Datastore and you try to snapshot the complete DS what happends if one of these produce an error? Will the entire process failed? If so i can understand that this is not an option.
Regards,
Joerg