AO And VVOL

[paymanzox]

Hello Everybody

I am trying to find out how vvols work in conjunction with AO. In VMware I am asked to create my 3 tiers of storage via storage policy. This seems to work against AO.

Thank you

[Sheldon Smith]

You've got it. You will want to create 3 CPGs for the vvol storage tiers (Gold, Silver, Bronze ?) that are not under AO control.

[paymanzox]

Maybe I do not mean I'm right.
I wanted to know how to use these two solutions together.
The reason for this is that in our work environment, users specify the virtual machine priority. (Golden, silver, bronze) if that's not right.On the other hand, based on the rate of reference to the block, it determines whether it is hot or cold.Of course if I got it right.

 Thank you

[Sheldon Smith · Accepted solution]

You will need to decide which method of control you want to use.
If you want to have users select a choice of tiers (gold, silver, bronze), then do not use AO with those CPGs.
Otherwise you set up a CPG with AO control, and the system chooses where the storage goes, not the users.

[skoocat]

To also clarify, when creating a storage profile in vSphere, to receive AO services on a vVol, when choosing a CPG for a storage profile, choose one is that is part of the AO configuration.  To avoid AO, make sure the storage profile does not request a CPG that is a member of an AO configuration.

[T_1_6]

I'll give my opinion on this.

I was GOING to setup the gold, silver, bronze crap, then I thought, forget this, I cannot be bothered, its use cases are so limited anyway these days, you want a set and forget scenario where the array just works away and moves the data for YOU.

So... I binned the idea of the VMware side 3 tiers, too much faffing, and basically enabled AO for ALL volumes (aside from snapshot CPG's of course).

So all of our Vms whether they are on VVOL, or VMFS datastore on the array, all get the full AO experience.
My opinion is leave the array to do stuff, and go off and use the time not spend manually selecting tiers to do something else.

What I did do was set a MINIMUM use on T0, so that as much data was forced up into the SSD tier as possible. Before I did this only around 600GB of data was pushed up , no matter the policy. Enfored the minimum, now 6TB or so on lovely SSD and the VMs are FLYING.

Just IMO of course, but the hardware is there to serve US and make things easier, not for us to make our own lives more hassle!

What you WILL need to do to get the vvols to be placed automatically on the correct CPG is prefix the CPG ID with vvol, then automatically these CPGs get used for VVOLs. Before this I was finding VMware would RANDOMLY place VVols on I think the first CPGID, which were different between our arrays. Putting "vvol" in front of the CPGs meant vmware would automatically place vvols on the right CPG.