PowerStore: Best practices for VMFS datastores - for Bootstorm or Failover with VMware SRM

1. Cause

When several virtual machines (VMs) are powered ON or OFF simultaneously, it could impact the overall performance of the appliance. It is recommended that the user follows the best practice considerations mentioned below while powering OFF multiple VMs.

When using VMWare SRM replication on a VMFS datastore it is recommended that UNMAP wouldn’t be performed during failover. Therefore, automatic UNMAP should be disabled on the VMFS 6 datastores, and UNMAP should be run manually, not during failover.

2. Solution

 
Set the FC adapter Queue depth to 64

UNMAP throttle rate to be set to VMware default setting (low priority)

Please use the guideline in the table below, when powering multiple VMs OFF. The table below shares the maximum number of VMFS datastores to hosts mapping that can be supported with auto UNMAP. If the config has more than what is listed in the table, please disable automatic UNMAP and use manual UNMAP instead

 

Platform	Max VMs concurrently powered ON\OFF (Tested limit)	Max number of cumulative ESXi Hosts to datastores mapping  (No. of Hosts x No. of VMFS datastores)
PowerStore T 1000	500	80
PowerStore X 1000	TBD	50
PowerStore T 3000	500	150
PowerStore X 3000	TBD	95
PowerStore T 5000	600	190
PowerStore X 5000	TBD	130
PowerStore T 7000	1000	240 This could be 20 DS and 12 hosts or 24 hosts and 10 datastores
PowerStore X 7000	TBD	170
PowerStore T 9000	1000	480 This could be 40 hosts and 12 DS or 16 hosts and 30 DS
PowerStore X 9000	TBD	260