Isilon and VLANs best practices

Question

Hello

I am new to isilon world

I am looking for a best practice to setup network for best performance with the new Isilon we are acquiring.

It's 5 X400 nodes and it will be storing mainly bulk data to be shared with MS Windows user's through SMB

and this will be bandweight consuming.

The cluster will also share through NFS application and little Oracle databases files to applications and DB servers (running Redhat linux)

We are thinking about separating users and servers network traffic by setting VLANs, for servers and users with dedicated smartpool for every VLAN.

Will this be beneficial from the performance point of view?

Thank you so much

regards

dynamox · Answer

this is what i do SmartConnect Advanced config for SMB

Peter_Sero · Answer

SmartPools is not related to networking... do you mean SmartConnect (Advanced)?

Use SmartPools to set the access pattern to "random" for the databases only,

that can help performance somewhat.

hth

-- Peter

Oussama_HMD · Answer

Thanks petrer for your feedback I am still confusing software for Isilon, yes I mean smart connect So do you thinks there will be no need to separate the subnets Regards

crklosterman · Answer

Great question Peter,

I’ll reach out internally and see if we’ve been mis-categorizing things or what’s happened.

Chris Klosterman, ICSP, ICIE, CCNA, VCP

Email: chris.klosterman@emc.com

Senior Solution Architect

Offer and Enablement Team

EMC²| Isilon Storage Division

crklosterman · Answer

Oussama_HMD

Welcome to the product. Understanding how to configure the front-end network on an Isilon cluster can seem like a daunting challenge, but it's really not. Your overarching goal should be to keep the design simple, adding extra subnets/VLANs although supported is not a necessity in 90% of cases, it does not affect performance, because in the end you're using the same spindles and the same network interfaces.

Here's a good place to begin:

https://support.emc.com/docu58740

Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of this doc that was just published last week.

Beyond that a good rule of thumb is unless you have (

1. firewalls to worry about

2. A dedicated WAN circuit for storage replication

3. Need to provide storage to non-routable networks

), then use just 1 subnet.

A good starting point for most customers is then 3 pools (assuming you have the SmartConnect advanced license)

1. Static Pool0 for stateful protocol client access

2. Dynamic Pool1 for stateless protocol client access

3. Static Pool2 for Backup and Replication (NDMP, SyncIQ), etc.

The link I posted above talks through decisions like these, how many IP addresses you need, and a number of others. Keep in mind to design for how big the cluster might one-day be, not how big it is today.

Enjoy your new Isilon cluster(s),

Chris Klosterman

Senior Solution Architect

EMC Isilon Offer & Enablement Team

chris.klosterman@emc.com

twitter: @croaking

Peter_Sero · Answer

Chris, just as a side note: why do these superb White Papers not get added here any more?: https://support.emc.com/products/15209_Isilon-OneFS/WhitePapers/ -- Peter

Oussama_HMD · Answer

Chris and all thanks for your feedback It's interesting the paper that Chris shared Enjoy your your weekend

Peter_Sero · Answer

Follow dynamox's link - you'll find the best practice!

crklosterman · Answer

Peter, This document is being re-categorized, thank you for catching this. ~Chris

Isilon

Isilon and VLANs best practices

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