All flash Infiniband VMware vSAN evaluation: Part 1 Setting up the Hosts

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Dinsdale

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Dec 29, 2015
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Mark,

Like your post and I am really curious what performance will come out of this setup with the NVME drives.

I have to make one side note though, as an utterly biased EMC employee:

'This new breed of software defined storage solutions has traditional shared storage vendors like EMC and NetApp scared.'

Apart from the fact that EMC still has a large stake in VMware and therefor has an interest in VSAN becoming a success, we also have our own software defined storage product, very similar to VSAN, called ScaleIO. In VMware-only environments we prefer VSAN over ScaleIO, but if you have other/heterogeneous environments, like (a mix of) HyperV, KVM, bare metal Linux or Windows, ScaleIO is a better fit, as VSAN is VMware only.

Of course I can't speak for Netapp, I can only hope they're scared ;-)

Tom
 

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
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Nice post. I too can't want to read more.

@Dinsdale well... EMC did just sell itself to Dell. ;) Not over vSAN, of course, but there are industrywide headwinds. How many smaller storage unicorns are going to fall in the next 24 months?
 

markpower28

Active Member
Apr 9, 2013
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Tom:

Thank you for great feedback. Software defined storage\hyperconvergence storage is the hottest industry trend at the moment. It reminds me about all the SSD based appliance 4-5 years ago. Lots of start up failed\being brought and a few standing still. They did give EMC\NetApp a great run for the money. That's one of the main reason EMC brought ExtremeIO, NetApp brought solidfire. They did solved the performance issues but we still need to make major investment in order to get IOs we need. It's not easy for any organization to have $250K worth of SAN storage sitting in there and waiting for depreciation.

Software defined storage\hyperconvergence storage will let people to have the flexibility to acquire additional capacity as needed vs. big investment up front. I do believe NVMe based SSD is the game changer. Please stay tuned for part 2 of the article. :)

Mark,

Like your post and I am really curious what performance will come out of this setup with the NVME drives.

I have to make one side note though, as an utterly biased EMC employee:

'This new breed of software defined storage solutions has traditional shared storage vendors like EMC and NetApp scared.'

Apart from the fact that EMC still has a large stake in VMware and therefor has an interest in VSAN becoming a success, we also have our own software defined storage product, very similar to VSAN, called ScaleIO. In VMware-only environments we prefer VSAN over ScaleIO, but if you have other/heterogeneous environments, like (a mix of) HyperV, KVM, bare metal Linux or Windows, ScaleIO is a better fit, as VSAN is VMware only.

Of course I can't speak for Netapp, I can only hope they're scared ;-)

Tom
 

markpower28

Active Member
Apr 9, 2013
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I can not agree more. What if Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) (2016) as part of standard edition? What if VMware vSAN is part of the essential bundle? Then what's going to happen to the "smaller storage unicorns"?

Nice post. I too can't want to read more.

@Dinsdale well... EMC did just sell itself to Dell. ;) Not over vSAN, of course, but there are industrywide headwinds. How many smaller storage unicorns are going to fall in the next 24 months?
 
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gigatexal

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Hmm, this has me thinking: has anyone dealt with purestorage, the company? They're an SSD only firm whose claim to fame is the ability to use super cheap off the shelf NAND (see: commodity, desktop grade SSDs) pair them with their secret sauce that works at the firmware level to do efficient wear leveling etc. Anyway, they're courting my firm and curious if anyone has deployed them in house or gone through a sales pitch
 

azev

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Jan 18, 2013
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The company I worked for just did a refresh of our giant 3par frame with pure; actually we are currently in the middle of deployment, but our upper management definitely drink the pure koolaid. The major advantages that we see immediately is that we are going from 16 cabinet storage frame to 2 cabinet, and much much less power and cooling requirements.
 

spazoid

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Apr 26, 2011
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In VMware-only environments we prefer VSAN over ScaleIO, but if you have other/heterogeneous environments, like (a mix of) HyperV, KVM, bare metal Linux or Windows, ScaleIO is a better fit, as VSAN is VMware only.

Tom

Why do you prefer VSAN over ScaleIO for vmware environments? It's my understanding that VSAN requires a very homogeneous disk configuration, where ScaleIO is more forgiving - what am I missing?
 

Dinsdale

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Dec 29, 2015
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Why do you prefer VSAN over ScaleIO for vmware environments? It's my understanding that VSAN requires a very homogeneous disk configuration, where ScaleIO is more forgiving - what am I missing?
Ease of management mainly. If you are an all VMware shop, you may have good reasons to stay that way. Also, VSAN is implemented differently in ESX than ScaleIO, which may give some benefits as well. But I do agree that VSAN is more strict about disk configuration.

And if you want to go beyond the current VSAN limit of 64 hosts, ScaleIO is the way to go.

Enough EMC soapbox now, I hope?
 

gigatexal

I'm here to learn
Nov 25, 2012
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alexandarnarayan.com
The company I worked for just did a refresh of our giant 3par frame with pure; actually we are currently in the middle of deployment, but our upper management definitely drink the pure koolaid. The major advantages that we see immediately is that we are going from 16 cabinet storage frame to 2 cabinet, and much much less power and cooling requirements.
Sent you a PM so as to not derail this thread. Any other thoughts on the storage solution from pure would be helpful too. Thanks
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Sent you a PM so as to not derail this thread. Any other thoughts on the storage solution from pure would be helpful too. Thanks
If you come out to visit their HQ let me know. They are just down the street.