topic Re: Lefthand VSA Instances in StoreVirtual Storage

Lefthand VSA Instances

Jerry Short — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:56:35 GMT

Anybody know how many instances of VSA can be run on a single physical server. Is it like VMs, just a matter of how much resource is available?

Re: Lefthand VSA Instances

Bart_Heungens — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:00:39 GMT

Hi,

Officially there should be only 1 VSA per server for optimal performance...

But technically it works installing multiple VSA's per server 'for testing and demo purposes'...

Kr,

Bart

Re: Lefthand VSA Instances

oikjn — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:14:59 GMT

thats the official word. I generally put two per physical, but make sure I don't overallocate CPUs or NICs and I make sure they aren't running on the same spindles... thats the most important thing IMO. I haven't run into a problem with that setup yet, but you do have to watch out how your system stripes data or the loss of single host will cause LUN access interruption.

Re: Lefthand VSA Instances

5y53ng — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 13:24:35 GMT

I am considering this approach as well. The number of disk drives and capacities in the latest generation of servers exceeds the maximum capacity of the VSA in SANiQ 9.5. I also thought two VSAs would be a good setup if you wanted to create a tiered storage system with multiple clusters on different types of disks (SAS, SATA, and SSD).

We had a conference call with HP and they indicated the maximum storage limit for the VSA "might" increase in SANiQ 10, and there might be support for a mixture of spindles and SSD, but nothing concrete.

Re: Lefthand VSA Instances

oikjn — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:46:05 GMT

I remember reading somewhere a while ago about the 10TB limit getting increased in v10 as well. That would be nice.

Not sure what you mean about the mixture of spindles... you talking about a VSA natively being able to use something like SSDs to boost its other storage drives? That would be nice, but I doubt that would be comming... I just get that same feature by using some LSI cards w/ their cachecade 2.0 feature. What I really Wish is for the VSAs to use available memory for read caching.

Re: Lefthand VSA Instances

5y53ng — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:05:06 GMT

Correct, we spoke with the product manager for the VSA and he mentioned something to the effect of the VSA being able to utilize SSDs to provide optimize performance. There were no specifics as to how this feature worked or what it was called, but it was mentioned in the talking points for SANiQ 10.