Reclaiming Space from a thin provisioned netword raid-5 volume

[David_Tocker]

Hey there.

We have a 7200 with 25 900gb 10k drives.

This replaced our 4 p4500 g2 nodes - and it absolutely wipes the floor performance wise.

We don't use iSCSI on the Storserv - I have been told its performance is not great, at least compared to FC.

The 8GB FC gear is pretty cheap these days, I would just bite the bullet and go that way. The performance will be better than even 10Gb iSCSI.

We havent found it necessary to look at flash caching etc, the 7200 has about 24GB of ram onboard and uses it for caching and seems to perform really well.

Have not needed to Peer-Motion between them - we have System Centre VMM setup and just setup a side by side environment and migrated everything across over a few weekends.

The storage integration into VMM actually works with the StorServ - its a little bit wierd (numbers aren't accurate) but it will provision a LUN and assign it to the cluster nodes automagically, so its better than the StorVirtual in which the integration does not actually let you do anything (High five StorVirtual/Lefthand/P4000/whatever you will be called next year Team!)

Stability is improved - using Hyper-V with the P4000s we had little stability problems popping up occasionally - the P4000s themselves never went down, but the iSCSI connections would drop once in a while, even over different switches, servers and operating systems. Performance was never really satisfactory on the P4000s either. Always 'felt' slow.

The StorServ never seems to do anything particularly fast, but also never does anything slowly either - It seems to be setup for hosting enviroments etc so nothing can ever take over the IO and effect other applications.

In summary: Highly recommended.

[a_o]

Thanks for the feedback.

A few questions though...

Are you running plain FC or is FCOE?

Are the 7200's  controllers able to run FCOE natively?

As we're running a mostly 2008R2 HyperV cluster setup,  ISCSI is great because CSVs can be presented to any Hyper V host on the network.  Our main DR server room  is about 1000ft away from the main datacenter - connected via TOR H3C switches with IRF.  As a side note, I've even deployed a stretch cluster by putting a VSA  node at a remote site (20 miles away) -  connected by a VPN without a problem with LHs multi-site functionality.

It would seem to me that this kind of topology would be problemmatic to replicate with 3PAR using just FC,  is it not ?

I've been seriously looking to moving to 2012 R2 Hyper V clusters because CSVs are no longer needed.
With the new 3PAR 7200c and their Converged controllers and File share 'personalilty' software, one would just put SMB shares anywhere on the network, and use them as shared storage for a Hyper-V cluster.

Lastly, I'm not sure if you know the answer, but can a 7200 be upgraded to a 7200c by just swapping the controllers?

[Bart_Heungens]

@a_o answer on your last question: yes you can simply replace the non-c controllers with the new c version...

For FCoE you need a duak-port 10Gb iSCSI/FCoE adapter in the PCIe slot of each controller.

Be aware that, if you want File Persona (NAS) functionality you need another network adapter in that same PCIe slot... So today you have to choose FCoE or NAS...

[CalvinZito]

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@a_o wrote:

Are the 7200's  controllers able to run FCOE natively?

Lastly, I'm not sure if you know the answer, but can a 7200 be upgraded to a 7200c by just swapping the controllers?

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The HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200 (in fact across the product line) doesn't support native FCoE - it's done via an adapter.

An existing 7200 system can be upgraded to 7200c via controller swap.  If it's something you're seriously thinking about, you should get contact your HP Rep.

[Gediminas Vilutis]

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Bart_Heungens wrote: 

And to answer (partially) your question on iSCSI, I am using my 3PAR in my lab/datacenter with FC direct attach and iSCSI, both work like I would expect no issues so far. I did not have the time however to do some performance testing so far...

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If you have 3PAR, connected to iSCSI, could you check flow control pause frame statistics on ports, where 3par controllers are connected? Some switches show it in standard 'show' or 'display interface' command output. If your switch does not show this statistics, then snmpwalk'ing oid 1.3.6.1.2.1.10.7.10.1.3 would do the trick.

Basically my problem with 3par is that write throughput to it via iscsi is terrible. Array starts to flood switches (ProCurve 6600) with pause frames when write speed from hosts reaches ~300 Mbps per interface and raises to something like 5000-6000 pause frames per second rate if I push traffic above 500Mbps (that is about 2 Gbps per array). Disk drives on backend are more or less iddling (~70-80 IOPS per 10krpm drive) during this. Problem now is reported to HP and is escalated to L3 support, no feedback yet.

So at the moment, until this is not fixed, I still can say - 'iscsi? no 3par.'. YMMV.

[oikjn]

https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=StoreVirtualSW 

v12 is out and it includes unmap!  yay.

haven't actually installed it yet, but its nice to see they got that feature in.

I see it also has a "DSM" for vmware now.  not going to help my hyper-v shop much, but thats probably a huge benefit to a lot of places.  

good job HP.

[Patrick Neuner]

Hopefully you can get it to work for Redhat Linux too....?

• Space Reclamation - StoreVirtual Storage can now reclaim space in VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows environments using T10 UNMAP.

[CalvinZito]

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@Patrick Neuner wrote:

Hopefully you can get it to work for Redhat Linux too....?

• Space Reclamation - StoreVirtual Storage can now reclaim space in VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows environments using T10 UNMAP.

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I would raise this with your HP rep. It's being looked at but I don't think there's a commitment or timeframe for support.

[Patrick Neuner]

According to HP support RHEL/Centos is NOT supported. We will still test it, but as it's officially not supported, the feature is again not fully implemented as you must be using Hyper-V oder VMWare, not other solutions. As VMWARE is Linux based, there is still hope, but if you have troubles afterwards - you will be left alone. 

[oikjn]

just an FYI... you have to right click on the management group and ENABLE space reclaimation ;)

Still not sure how its going to work, but I know it didn't do anything all day because I didn't enable it!