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MSA2040 tiering and unmap

 
n3rdyone
New Member

MSA2040 tiering and unmap

Hi All,

I'm an accidental storage admin, and I manage 4 different MSA2040's , all are direct connected to ESXi clusters with thin provisioned VMDKs. Monthly I schedule a job to unmap the volumes from the ESXI hosts. This all makes sense on 3 of the 4 MSAs.  I have one MSA2040 that has auto tiering enabled and has a performance SSD tier, and a Midlline 7.2 SATA archive tier. There are two volumes in the archive tier and two volumes in the performance tier.

There is a huge discrepancy between ESXi hosts and the MSA2040 where storage is being used.  From the ESXi host, it shows the volumes in the archive tier are 90% full (4TB of 5TB allocated) , but from the MSA2040 , it shows the volume on the archive pool is only 50% used (2.4TB of 5TB allocated) ESXi shows that the SSD volume is 55% allocated where as the MSA2040 shows it is 95% allocated

Running the unmap commands from the esxi host seemingly does nothing to change the discrepancy. Should I be unmapping volumes that are auto tiering ? Is this storage space discrepancy expected ? 

4 REPLIES 4
ArunKKR
HPE Pro

Re: MSA2040 tiering and unmap

Hi,

 

Could you share the output of the below commands?

 

show pools

show disk-groups

show volumes

 

 


While I am an HPE Employee, all of my comments (whether noted or not), are my own and are not any official representation of the company

Accept or Kudo

giladzzz
Honored Contributor

Re: MSA2040 tiering and unmap

Hi

if you are using auto teiring than the MSA puts as much data as it can on SSD 

and only sends data to the Midlline tier if the SSD tier is full from your post

it is not clear if you are using auto tier because you mention 2 volumes

but maybe it is one pool cosisting of two disk groups!!

also consider that MSA data is thin privisioned and Vmware data can be

thin provisioned but also full provisioned ( lazy zeroed or eager zeroed)

Regards

Give a KUDO if this helps

 

ohmkorapt
Occasional Visitor

Re: MSA2040 tiering and unmap

We will renew our hardware which includes an MSA p2000. On that MSA we configured two RAID 5 with 146 GB HDs and two Hot spares. At the moment, we have around 2.5 TB Data. 500 GB of that data (databases) would profit from SSDs and the rest can be stored on HDs. We don’t use the Storage as archive, it omegle  is only used for virtualization. I don't have a lot of experience in the storage topic. Fist I talked to our Hardware Partner who isn't a storage specialist by himself. He offered the MSA 2052 with 22 * 900 GB HDs 15K RPM 12GB/s. Connected via direct FC 16GB/s. I guess the configuration would have been the two included SSDs as read cache, two Raid5 with 2 Hot spares. I thought that is a very basic solution and I figured we could built something better. I read some guides, quick specs and best practices of the MSA HPE 2052 and came up with this configuration. With all the information I gathered, I want to use the Auto-Tiering. I want to know if this should work fine or if th omegle ere are better ways than this. We need to buy the following disks.

ArunKKR
HPE Pro

Re: MSA2040 tiering and unmap

Hi,

Please check the response shared by Jon Paul for the same query in below web link:

https://community.hpe.com/t5/MSA-Storage/Question-Regarding-HPE-MSA-2052/td-p/7160661#.YhESbOhBw2w

 


While I am an HPE Employee, all of my comments (whether noted or not), are my own and are not any official representation of the company

Accept or Kudo