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Equallogic - storage pool question
HI
Got 1x PS6000X running our vmware estate for 18 months now, great stuff cracking performance for us, v happy.
Now looking at virtualising SQL servers, so bought another PS6000X :-)
I see several paths in front of me in terms of adding this new member to the group, but since i have only been managing one member up to now I am unsure of the best way to proceed.
Original PS6000X is running RAID-50.
1. Add new member to group, set as RAID-50 and assign to default storage pool.
2. Add new member to group, set as RAID-10 and assign to default storage pool. Use preferred raid group setting on volumes to make sure SQL volumes go onto the RAID-10 member.
3. Add new member to group, set as RAID-10 and assign to new storage pool called SQLData or similar. SQL volumes go into new storage pool.
What i can't decide is what is best:
Choice 1 above will double the number of spindles in default storage group, but leave it all on RAID-50. So vmware IO and SQL IO all hit the same spindles, but because there are twice as many, and the volumes will be spread out across all disks in both members there may be no noticeable performance impact for either vmware or SQL. (possibly).??
Choice 2 could work but overrides the in-built load\perf balancing act of the equallogic. Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Choice 3 kinda makes sense.
What i don't want to do is count myself out of the 'cleverness' and load balancing etc. of having a second member in our group, thus increasing IO and bandwidth and all the rest of it.
Could somebody share their thoughts and any experience they have on the subject?
Many thanks
dave
Got 1x PS6000X running our vmware estate for 18 months now, great stuff cracking performance for us, v happy.
Now looking at virtualising SQL servers, so bought another PS6000X :-)
I see several paths in front of me in terms of adding this new member to the group, but since i have only been managing one member up to now I am unsure of the best way to proceed.
Original PS6000X is running RAID-50.
1. Add new member to group, set as RAID-50 and assign to default storage pool.
2. Add new member to group, set as RAID-10 and assign to default storage pool. Use preferred raid group setting on volumes to make sure SQL volumes go onto the RAID-10 member.
3. Add new member to group, set as RAID-10 and assign to new storage pool called SQLData or similar. SQL volumes go into new storage pool.
What i can't decide is what is best:
Choice 1 above will double the number of spindles in default storage group, but leave it all on RAID-50. So vmware IO and SQL IO all hit the same spindles, but because there are twice as many, and the volumes will be spread out across all disks in both members there may be no noticeable performance impact for either vmware or SQL. (possibly).??
Choice 2 could work but overrides the in-built load\perf balancing act of the equallogic. Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Choice 3 kinda makes sense.
What i don't want to do is count myself out of the 'cleverness' and load balancing etc. of having a second member in our group, thus increasing IO and bandwidth and all the rest of it.
Could somebody share their thoughts and any experience they have on the subject?
Many thanks
dave
Donald_Williams
72 Posts
565
0
Posted March 10th, 2011 06:00
Hello,
All three are valid and have pros/cons. Do you have SANHQ installed? If not, I suggest you do. That will help you determine the current load and IO pattern and decide what would be best. Not sure how many connections you currently have or if you are going to add more servers, but separate pools would double the available number of connections.
A nice thing about RAID-10 is you can convert it to R50 at anytime, but not the other way around.
-donmellerbeck
6 Posts
565
0
Posted March 16th, 2011 15:00
Curious to get even more details. The beautiful and 'intended' method of EqualLogic would be to add another PS6000X, RAID 50 it and just let the magic happen. Really make sure you understand your networking backbone for this though since the traffic between members and your redundant networking can be significant.
In our place we have a couple of fairly heavy hit SQL servers, as well as the rest of our biz vmwared (say 30 odd window servers, 1 exchange, AD etc..) We have 2 PS6000X with RAID 50, and let the volumes span as desired. The SAN is not the bottleneck in our environment, and SANHQ reads a very boring low all the time.
Like mentioned above what does SAN HQ say for your usage ATM? How many SQL servers are you thinking of adding, how many IOPS would they require? My gut is, unless you are 'special' grab another PS6000 RAID-50 add it to the pool and go, otherwise why buy the magic right?
bennice2002
27 Posts
565
0
Posted March 9th, 2011 18:00