Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
11 Posts
0
3223
Unity VMFS Datastore Simple but Fast
Hi Folks,
what's your best practice?
I have an Unity 400, mixed Pool (some Flash, some 10k SAS drives).
I would like to create one LUN and present this to 4-5 Vmware Host.
Unity is Actice-Active Controller by Design right? But as LUNs are still ALUA, it would be a good Idea to create a LUN for SPA and SPB, right?
How is about two Expand the VMFS Datastore created on LUN0(SPA) by the space from LUN1(SPB), good Idea or not?
Thanks and Regards
Didi
SteveK821
2 Intern
2 Intern
•
140 Posts
0
November 17th, 2017 01:00
It depends what else is on the array. Generally you should try and balance the load across both SPs. So create at least 2 Datastores, one owned by SP-A, one by SP-B. A LUN or Datastore is online to one SP, VMware will only send I/O to the SP owning the datastore. You will see half the paths as "Active (I/O)" and the other half as just "Active". The Multipathing should be using VMTP_ALUA_CX and Round Robin.
I am guessing you are using Fibrechannel so make sure all ESX hosts are zoned to ports on both SPs.
I don't understand what you mean with your last question.
Have you connected the Unity to your vCenter server? (In Unisphere: Access -> VMware) If so, then you can create a new VMFS datastore in Unisphere (Storage -> VMware), then decide which Hosts can access it. The Unisphere wizard will then contact vCenter and tell it to rescan for new datastores, setting up the new Datastore automatically.
Regards,
Stephen
DWormsbecher
11 Posts
0
November 17th, 2017 02:00
I mean, you can add two Datastores for sure.
But what if I add LUN0 as Datastore and expand this one by extend from LUN1.
SteveK821
2 Intern
2 Intern
•
140 Posts
1
November 17th, 2017 04:00
You could do that. But why would you need to use extents? VMware doesn't stripe data across extents.
Datastores can be expanded by increasing the size of the LUN/Datastore on the Unity.
I had never heard of this before (extents in VMware), but here's an interesting blog post:
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/02/vmfs-extents-are-they-bad-or-simply-misunderstood.html
I don't think you can use the integration between Unisphere and vCenter to configure this. You would have use the LUN/Block assignement method (the old-fashioned way) and manually set up the Datastore in VMware.