MSA2042 does Virtual Volume size affect performance?

[Raffiss]

Hi,

I have MSA2042 with 4 extra msa2040 (total place for 60 3,5 inch hard drives). We are running Windows  2016 fileserver. We created Virtual Volume size bigger than we have storage. We made it 100TB on PoolB (virtual disk group 36TB).We do not know how fast data usage will grow. I wonder if it will affect array and Windows server performance if we create Virtyal Volume 300TB in case we will have much more data?

Any help and tips are appreciated.

Regards

Raffiss

[HPSDMike]

The maximum size of a single volume is 128TiB so you can't go much beyond what you have now as a single volume. You'd have to present multiple volumes to the host and let the host deal with multiple mount points however it can do it best. Regarding performance, it always depends unfortunatelty. There is hardly ever a clear consistent answer to every performance question. Depending on your storage network setup (bandwidth, number of adapters, numbers of paths, multipathing rules, etc) you can sometimes get better overall performance from more volumes versus less (due to concurrency). But, again, it depends on the exact specifics of your workload and setup. If you are happy your performance on a 100TB volume then you can continue to make that your standard. 

Just be careful with the amount of overcommitment you have (100TB usable provisioned) on 36TB raw. All it takes an errant job, or some carelessness, to fill up your drives beyond what the OS thinks it has. Bad things happen at that point when the OS tries to write without no actual storage available underneath. Not unacceptable by any means so long as you're watching it.

[Raffiss]

Thus it starting to be complicated. We would like to give all our users to have possibility to have 1TB storage. We have little more than 200 users. I never read in msa2040 manuals about  limits of 128TB.

I use for storage pass-through disk on Hyper-V client to avoid 64TB limit of vhdx disks. How I will solve the problem with 128 TB than on OUr Windows Server 2016 file servers?

[HPSDMike]

I think you are trying to solve your problem in the wrong place. Block storage targets present LUNs to the host. Each block storage device (whether an HPE product or not) has a maximum size LUN it can present based on design and controller limitations. The MSA has a max of 128TB which is very generous if you take a look at some other block storage devices on the market. You have to start asking yourself how big you want any single device to be from a formatting and corruption potential standpoint from ths OS perspective Windows gives you many ways in which you may want to solve this which include creating mount points under your drive, using dynamic disks, etc. Do all your users need to be on the same physical volume on the window server? why not spread them out a little bit? Create some 64TB volumes and give some space on one volume, some on another, etc.