topic Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning in Array Setup and Networking

VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

cdrummond71 — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 21:40:19 GMT

I am upgrading our vCentre and EqualLogic's to the latest vCentre and brand new Nimble's. My question is how do I provision the volumes. I am leaning towards thin provision on the Nimble's and Eager Zero (thick provisioning) via vCentre but would like the communities opinion.

Thanks,

Chris

Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

pfrisoli27 — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 11:40:57 GMT

hello, for most cases you will want to mimic the Nimble/VMFS provisioning. My thought is to leverage Thin as you can extend both the Nimble volumes and ESX datastores as needed, and if ever needed, you can convert thin to thick. I have copied some screen shots and attached our VMware Best Practice Guide for reference. Check out P. 13-14 which reviews this topic. If you have further questions please contact Support and they can provide additional detail. Hope this helps...

Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

cdrummond71 — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 14:08:21 GMT

Thanks for the quick response. Is the performance the same for Eager Zero vs Thin on the Nimble side?

Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

bgrieve65 — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 16:06:15 GMT

Chris,

You will not see any performance differences between the default thin provisioning vs. using reservations on Nimble.

Brandon Grieve

Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

abouliane119 — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 16:10:09 GMT

Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed

Creates a virtual disk in a default thick format. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated when the virtual disk is created. Data remaining on the physical device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand at a later time on first write from the virtual machine.

Using the default flat virtual disk format does not zero out or eliminate the possibility of recovering deleted files or restoring old data that might be present on this allocated space. You cannot convert a flat disk to a thin disk.

Thick Provision Eager Zeroed

A type of thick virtual disk that supports clustering features such as Fault Tolerance. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time. In contrast to the flat format, the data remaining on the physical device is zeroed out when the virtual disk is created. It might take much longer to create disks in this format than to create other types of disks.

Thin Provision

Use this format to save storage space. For the thin disk, you provision as much datastore space as the disk would require based on the value that you enter for the disk size. However, the thin disk starts small and at first, uses only as much datastore space as the disk needs for its initial operations.

Source : http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc_50%2FGUID-4C0F4D73-82F2-4B81-8AA7-1DD752A8A5AC.html

Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

sgalbincea137 — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 17:18:44 GMT

We recently implemented 2xCS460s via dual Brocade VDX 6740s in logical VCS mode. Everything I am doing is thin on the Nimble side and eager zero thick on the VMware side. Since the Nimble disregards the zeros you still get to see actual data usage from a volume perspective in the Nimble console. Very, very happy so far coming from a pretty large EqualLogic stack to this - no comparison with regards to performance whatsoever with half the spindles in play.

Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

trsonber42 — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 16:06:30 GMT

Are your nimble arrays running exchange DBs and log files? If so to clarify you are running thin on the nimble side and thick eager zero on the vmware datastore side? I've seen documentation that says to match it nimble to vmware.

We are also in the process of transitioning from an Equallogic environment

Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

lindy37 — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 15:42:42 GMT

I am doing the same thing. I also came from Equallogic and both our technical sales rep and the Nimble instructor in the one day class said to "Thin on Nimble, Thick Egar Zeroed on VM's". I migrated all of my VM's this way.

Re: VCentre and Nimble Storage, Thick vs Thin Provisioning

lindy37 — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 15:45:14 GMT

Yes I have two Exchange 2010 Mailbox servers with 3 volumes each. One to host the C:\, D:\ drives (ESX 5) one for Exchange logs and one for Exchange data. I backup using Backup Exec 2014 in VM, so no in guest iSCSI for me.

All of them are thin on the Nimble side, Thick eager zero on VM side. Everything runs great so far.