topic Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage in StoreVirtual Storage

Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

5y53ng — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 20:16:38 GMT

I was listening to the podcast yesterday regarding the version 11.0 announcement. A 50TB capacity will be available as well as tiered storage for optimizing to flash and SSD. No TRIM/UNMAP yet, but it's on the way according to the announcement.

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/Deep-dive-podcast-with-StoreVirtual-VSA-team/ba-p/144459#.UhJ2oKMYl4c

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

oikjn — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 22:42:30 GMT

yay!

I hope one day they sort out whatever is needed to get unmap to work as thin provisioning volume growth is definitely a long-term problem, but the rest of the things they mention all sound good. Looking forward to the release.

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Sbrown — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 11:36:05 GMT

so you have to pay to upgrade your VSA to have storage tiering?

seems like this should be free.

What's the word? It's almost like they are renaming the product

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

oikjn — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:30:50 GMT

where did you read that? The blog post I read did talk about three tiers of licenses... 3/10/50 w/ the 3TB one limited to 3 nodes and no tiering, that kinda implies that the 10TB one (AKA the current solution) includes Tiering.... one thing I"m not clear on is if that tiering is inter-node or intra-node (IE, will it auto-tier between SATA nodes and SSD nodes or is it a node with SATA and SSD drives attached).

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

5y53ng — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:55:16 GMT

How you implement the tiering was my question as well.

My initial impression was that you would need to provision a physical disk group on the server raid controller using SSD, SAS, or go with PCIe flash, (whatever your high-performance disks are) then create a virtual disk on that storage and designate it as the high performance tier in the CMC.

If above is the case, how does it work if your server uses smart-cache like the p420?Perhaps the two are complimentary?

Lot's of questions...

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

5y53ng — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:56:20 GMT

If I recall from the podcast, existing VSA licenses will retain the 10TB capacity, but include the auto-tiering.

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Sbrown — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 11:37:03 GMT

so as long as you have valid support you will get free upgrade? What about non-vsa users?

You have this in writing somewhere?

My SE1120 with P420/2gb FBWC is ready! 1.5TB of read ssd caching for raid-5 volume can be reconfigured to do both read/write tiering?

Honestly I'd be more happy if they would come up with host side unified cache design and write-back caching.

ie you are on same node as VSA, you write preferred to VSA local node first. It will ACK then you continue.

Read caching could be done too on host side :)

Also regarding trim, if we had RLE compression wouldn't that take care of unmap/trim? simple zero compression would take of that?

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

5y53ng — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 13:06:17 GMT

Some of my support contracts actually expired, but I haven't had any issues downloading updates through the CMC. I think so long as your nodes are licensed or within the evaluation period there shouldn't be any issue upgrading.

In the podcast it was stated that tiering and capacity increases were VSA only features for now.

The tiering implementation in 11.0 is a good start, I'd like to see some RAM utilization for cache similar to Nexenta/ZFS in the future.

Since the VSA is software-defined storage I'm not sure how much host-side integration is possible. A DSM equivalent for ESXi would be nice along with better vCenter integration. I would love to have my CMC show up as an extra tab in the vSphere client similar to how the VMWare VSA is integrated.

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Sbrown — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 11:12:03 GMT

Well with VSAN and VFLASH announced what do you think of esxi 5.5 versus store virtual?

Seems that for once vmware might hold the upper hand. I really am looking forward to see how that "evacuate" a VSA host feature works.

The main thing that storevirtual had was iscsi so if a node failed, all the hosts connected did not crash (they had no form of CARP/VRRP for their nfs) whereas ISCSI connects to multiple vsa and sustains a storage node failure quite happily.

SCSI_UNMAP support in esxi 5.5 will definitely put the pressure on storevirtual to support trimming!

I think competition is good, it ensures everyone gets the new features they are wanting.

What I'd love to see is a good reliable NAS (nfs/smb) to run on the FOM to dish out multiprotocol with storevirtual. that would be hot. the microsoft smb is good but their nfs is horrible

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Andre van den Berg_1 — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 09:38:17 GMT

Yesterday received the following e-mail:

         HP StoreVirtual Storage
Dear HP StoreVirtual Customer,

Thank you for your continued interest in the HP StoreVirtual Storage. Unfortunately, we have reached the maximum number of participants in our Controlled Release for LeftHand OS 11.0. General availability for LeftHand OS 11.0 via Online Upgrades in the StoreVirtual Centralized Management Console is scheduled for mid-November 2013. Again, thank you for registering for this Controlled Release Program.

Thank you for continuing to be a valued HP customer.
HP StoreVirtual Team

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

vlho — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:25:57 GMT

Hi all

new version 11 is available for download on HP portal now:

https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductsList.do?category=SWSDED

HP StoreVirtual - Receive for free...

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

oikjn — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 12:50:31 GMT

nice link.

It says CMC should offer the program starting on Nov. 11th.... wish they wouldn't bother with the symbolic 11/11 release date or if they really cared they should have released it two years ago :)

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

RemyZ — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 14:30:30 GMT

It seems that 11.0 is released.

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Sbrown — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:20:52 GMT

yes! the EXE installer works perfectly! Just fire up a VM (on local DAS or physical) run the exe installer, point it at a vcenter or host and it will take care of it all.

Adaptive optimization works great, you get two tiers and all storage. It is not the same as HP SMARTCACHE or LSI CACHECADE! if you allocate 2TB to SSD and 8TB to RAID-5 SATA , you get a total of 10TB usable! (VSA).

You can also use HP smart cache along with this to make it even faster. Or do a split like 15K SAS RAID-10 tier-0 and 7.2K SAS RAID-5/6/50/60!

Awesome! just upgrade! Remember that if you upgrade to 11 - you may not be very happy with deprecation of windows 2003 (VSS/MPIO) but I have not verified that myself.

With 1 VSA (no redundancy), it takes about 15 minutes to install CMC and a node. The only thing you should do is power down the VSA, change the MAC ADDRESS to Manual to match your licensing, then continue setup. Otherwise you will get a dynamic mac address and that could turn out BAD!

Also all PVSCSI and VMXNET3 ! awesome sauce!

I have to say really impressed.

Now all we need is re-thinning, but I'm happy!! This blows away performance from 10 due to Adaptive Optimization.

I may post a single node test with 40gbe mellanox connect-x3 to a single tier of 2TB SSD and 5TB of 15K SAS and some other combinations including cachecade and hp smartcache/smartpath to see how much faster this vsa can scale!

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

twitchit — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 12:01:13 GMT

An sharing of performance benchmarks would be greatly appreciated.

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Sbrown — Sat, 02 Nov 2013 03:57:57 GMT

Any requests?

We will be running the VSA test on a P4300 G2 ugpraded to P420/1gb FBWC and L5639 CPU with 12gb of ram - esxi 5.5 - dual 10gbe port (emulex be2). 8 LFF drives but i'd be glad to stuff some SSD in there.

Only had $600 budget for server so that had to do. [sas and ssd drives already had laying around]

Start simple? 512GB of SSD[r1] and 2.5tb of raid-5 15K 450GB?

could do 512 SSD HP Smartcache, 2.5TB tier-0.

then
256 HP smartcache, 256 tier-0 ssd, 2.5TB TIER-1 15K SAS RAID-5

then 512 tier-0 R1 SSD, 2.5TB Tier-1 15K SAS RAID-5

then repeat with raid-10?

I can do 2 machines once I figure out how to get 10-20gbps of speed out of the box.

It would be cool to do the pepsi challenge against the Hyper-V.

I'd like to hear from HP about this: The large-scale workloads with intensive I/O patterns require adapter queue depths greater than the Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) default values. Current PVSCSI queue depth default values are 64 ( for device) and 254 (for adapter). You can increase PVSCSI queue depths to 256 (for device) and 1024 (for adapter) inside a Windows virtual machine.

So can you not change these values in *nix? How does that affect ESXi versus Hyper-V2012/r2 performance? !!

Hp let us know!!

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Sbrown — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 17:03:19 GMT

So you have PCI-E FLASH,RAMSAN on your VSA but can't push each LUN to 255 QD (or more?)

2 vcpu with default settings are not going to push that 40gbe nic and storage subsystem to 1 million IOPS!

The problem is of course simple - if you can't push 255 QD your SSD will never get a true workout. If you can't dispatch i/o against more VCPU, you will not be able to handle the i/o - Both EThernet and Storage this is true!

What I would suggest is the ability to tweak both storage and networking for the VSA - esxi -> and hyper-v so you can push hard.

I would suggest that a STOREVIRTUAL VSA 11 with TIER-0 of RAM [backed with flash], and TIER-1 of SSD might be able to reach 1 million IOPS with the ability to add more VCPU, tweak Storage Queue Depth/Ring, and likewise tweak the VMXNET3 subsystem to run 4,5,6,7,8 (or more) vcpu.

So here's the deal! If anyone can get logged into their lefthand (shell) VSA..

try this - or maybe HP lefthand engineers can tell us the whole story.......

[I am asking lefthand engineers, not end users ..! DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS! ]

Append the following to kernel boot args ( edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg) and reboot the system.

vmw_pvscsi.cmd_per_lun=255 vmw_pvscsi.ring_pages=32

You can verify the changed queue depth by doing a cat on these module args i.e.

$ cat /sys/module/vmw_pvscsi/parameters/cmd_per_lun

$ cat /sys/module/vmw_pvscsi/parameters/ring_pages

(link to older source: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/142160)

#define PVSCSI_DEFAULT_NUM_PAGES_PER_RING	8
#define PVSCSI_DEFAULT_NUM_PAGES_MSG_RING	1
#define PVSCSI_DEFAULT_QUEUE_DEPTH		64
#define SGL_SIZE				PAGE_SIZE

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

Andre van den Berg_1 — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 06:36:12 GMT

Has anyone already dowloaded it trought the CMC?

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

AuZZZie — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 16:04:51 GMT

Still not available through CMC on either of my sites.

Not that I'm surprised.

Re: Version 11.0 Announced, Finally - Capacity Increase and Tiered-Storage

oikjn — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 17:26:55 GMT

the VSA main page says Nov 30th last time I checked. Not sure why they delayed it. I know you can download it direct right now (and I did), but I'm going to wait until after the update becomes available through CMC before I install it on my SAN.