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

 
Delta69
Occasional Visitor

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

Hello,

 

I have 2 questions regarding VSA 2014 / LeftHand 11.0. Perhaps someone could help ?

 

- Can you confirm it's possible to go beyond the global 50TB limit buying additional licences (with additional hardware for these licences, of course...), so as 100 or 150TB could be seen from a unique management console ? (In other words, I do not want to split the architecture into several separate 50TB vSANs managed separately !)

 

- What about the global performance when all the data is spread among multiple identical servers ? Is global performance increasing in adding servers and storage, or is it better to have  as less server as possible, but choosing the most powerful ones ? (I'm not dealing with data security, just performance...).

 

Thanks for your feedbacks !

a_o
Valued Contributor

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

AFAIK, there's no 50TB global limit.
Version 11 intoduced a new 50TB VSA license.


There's a limit of "Up to 3 StoreVirtual VSAs per cluster" - i.e. a cluster can have 150TB of raw storage in VSA.

 

The current physical appliances support up to 1536 TB per NSM. (i.e. BL series based - 4630sb  w/ 32 D2700 expansion chassis)

So, using the VSA limits, StoreVirtual can scale up to 4608 TB per cluster using physical appliances. (i.e. up to 800 SFF SAS disks per cluster)

 

I've read about an unofficial 10 node limit in a cluster. But I've also seen an HP sponsored ESG report showing a configuration with 30 nodes in a cluster servicing 100,000 Exchange users.

 

However, there's no limit on how many clusters that can be configured in a single management group.

 

a_o
Valued Contributor

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

Regarding performance, it depends ...
I don't fully understand what you mean by "adding servers and storage" But I'll give it a try.
Like any I/O based issue, you can always throw more spindles, CPU and I/O bandwidth at it.


StoreVirtual scales well in the sense that with it's clustering methodology, multiple nodes in the same cluster can service requests for data in the same LUN from different hosts at the same time. Coupled with MPIO you can get even better performance. So, yes more storage nodes will increase performance.

In any case, there are so many ways to skin this cat and YMMV.

With the new Gen8 based NSMs with full SSD and 10GBE/FC or the newer ones with AO, you'll have all of your performance requirements met I think. Granted that it's not exactly 3PAR SSD or Pure Storage.

My take is that if you need the best performance from StoreVirtual, go with VSA vs NSM.

We started with P4300/P4500 NSMs. I wasn't happy with the performance -especially with SQL server.
Eventually, I converted our setup to VSAs, using 10GBE, BL I/O accelerators and a mixture of MLC SSD and 15K/10K SAS drives. The cherry on top for going with VSA's is that when needed, we can do HW Raid 1 or 10 on the physical drives as opposed to being limited to 5/6/50. Makes a difference in the write performance.

In all, we have 16 blades running one to two VSAs each depending on what kind of data is being served.

I'm much happier with the performance we're getting.

 

oikjn
Honored Contributor

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

@a_o - I think the 3-node limit is w/ the new smaller VSA license, I think there isn't any change to the limit recommendations on the 10 or 50TB nodes.  HP gives its recomendations on the number of nodes/clusters per management group and I can't remember them offhand.

 

One thing to keep in mind is there is a limit to the total number of iscis connections, so depending on how you connect this can become an issue as the scale goes up.  At a point you can't use full active MPIO because of the iSCSI connection limits, but w/ 50TB VSAs, that issue is a bit mitigated as you can put more data onto a single node.  ( I think the issue starts to crop up typically after a cluster gets more than 8 nodes in it).

Bart_Heungens
Honored Contributor

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

Hi,

 

The 1TB is a free license that comes from now on with the most popular HP Proliant Gen8 servers. There is indeed a max 3 node count in a cluster.

The other (non-free) licenses of 4, 10 and 50TB are not limited as such... Inside the CMC, there is a best practice analyzer that will tell you about the max nodes in a cluster and management group. Depending of who you ask at HP it will be somewhere between 16 and 20 in 1 cluster...

 

 

kr,

Bart

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Delta69
Occasional Visitor

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

Thanks a lot guys for your feedbacks... I really appreciate... It'll help for sure.

 

By the way, Merry Xmas !

 

oikjn
Honored Contributor

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

bart, had a quick question I PMed you... about the practical side of if you can have a split v11/v10.5 management group.
Bart_Heungens
Honored Contributor

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

check mail!

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oikjn
Honored Contributor

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

just an FYI.  I was able to delete an existing VSA and exchange it with a clean installed v11 into a v10.5 cluster, so v10.5 and v11 can co-exist in the same cluster :).  For anybody who tries this, make sure you stop the manager on the VSA before you destroy it.

Northwoods
Frequent Advisor

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

The 10 node limit is what HP tests the software against. The engineering maximum was 32 nodes (not-supported) awhile back, not sure if this has increased or not. The problem with large clusters is the amount of background chatter you get...think of all the backend replication traffic for a multi-site cluster with 16-nodes at each site.