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Re: vCenter Plug-in - Why no performance policy selection?

 
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ron_fisher
Advisor

vCenter Plug-in - Why no performance policy selection?

We're on 2.2.5 and I've found the true beauty in the vcenter plug-in when it comes to snap clone presentation and un-presentation...  thank you!

Why wasn't giving the ability to choose a performance policy during LUN creation considered a must have? You cannot go in and tweak the policy in the array web interface after the fact unless I'm missing something? Many of the other values you can set in the plug-in are editable later. Inquiring minds want to know if this is on the road map?

gracias,

Ron

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Nick_Dyer
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: vCenter Plug-in - Why no performance policy selection?

Hi Ron,

Good observation. In fact it's one I asked as well. Also thanks for the positive words on the vCenter Plugin - I agree it's pretty cool in many ways, and is a major contrast to our 1.0 plugin which was in 1.4 (you may or may not have seen that!)

I believe the reason why is typically when you're creating datastores for VMware the Application Policy that you're assigning those datastores 99% of the time will be "VMware ESX" or "VMware ESX 5", unless you're creating a datastore specifically for Exchange or SQL alone. Therefore it makes sense to automate the designation of the policy to be assigned the generic VMware policies.

You CAN change the policy assigned to the datastore afterwards (on the array only) but it MUST conform to the same block size of 4K, but can have different characteristics around caching and compression.

With the introduction of VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs for short) this will all change significantly as we'll allow you to present the App Policy designation to each individual VMDK you're creating rather than having to generically assign a policy for the whole datastore... VMware are calling it "Storage Policy Based Management" for their offering, which coincidentally mirrors our idea of presenting policies to storage for different requirements...

Nick Dyer
twitter: @nick_dyer_
ron_fisher
Advisor

Re: vCenter Plug-in - Why no performance policy selection?

This seems like a case of dumbing down the interface for users that perhaps shouldn't be provisioning storage in the first place. If block sizes and caching policies are not in your wheelhouse then maybe find an old school storage guy. Regardless it should be a simple thing to add to the next version of the plug-in PLEASE!

Nick_Dyer
Honored Contributor

Re: vCenter Plug-in - Why no performance policy selection?

Appreciate your comments Ron, but Nimble is designed for the IT generalist so anything we can do to streamline and simplify matters is something we'll always try to do - the vCenter plugin is designed for typically VMware admins to provision and manage their own storage in the most simplistic way possible without having to be concerned about block size alignment, compression/caching etc.

It WOULD be nice to have this option under an "advanced" tab, which I agree with you on, and i'll send it on to engineering to log as a request.

Nick Dyer
twitter: @nick_dyer_
ron_fisher
Advisor

Re: vCenter Plug-in - Why no performance policy selection?

Thanks for your input Nick. Personally I think you can only obfuscate things so far in the IT world before things come back to byte you. ;-) If you're and IT guy deploying a SQL server you should know that you need to set block sizes on Windows data and log partitions that are friendly to the I/O profile for the application not the default 4K gee-wiz disk wizard. We should still be made to think about our actions. That said all the CIO's will love the idea of being able to hire high school drop outs to run their IT departments.

marty_booth
Occasional Advisor

Re: vCenter Plug-in - Why no performance policy selection?

I definitely agree with this, sure you can have it default to the standard performance policy, but another tab or something whereby you can override would be useful. I have already had instances whereby I have had to revert to the Nimble web GUI to create volumes as I have been unable to change the default policy, and whilst it is only marginally more overhead to do this, it is still additional administrative overhead...

I would also like the ability to select/change the initiator group used for a cluster (or somewhere set the default IG to be used for a cluster) when creating a new volume. As I already have an Initiator Group assigned against my ESX hosts, if I create a new volume from the vCenter Plugin, it creates a new IG named EsxHosts. Not ideal for how we use the array.

I understand that you may want to design the most simplistic methodology for doing things from within the vCenter plugin for IT generalists...But placing limitations on how/what you can do from one interface is not always a good idea imho. The plugin should be able to do EVERYTHING that the web GUI can do. The same goes for commandline/powershell etc. Having a default method is ok, but give the ability to let the rest of us choose/configure the remaining options

Just my 2 cents...

Marty

CBVista
Occasional Advisor

Re: vCenter Plug-in - Why no performance policy selection?

I agree with everything stated above!

I don't mind the process of creating a volume through Nimble manually, then scanning for it on one of the hosts, then creating a VMFS volume... this is still much quicker than my old SAN... but I'd love the plugin to just offer the same fileds that are already present in the Nimble volume creation wizard

Breaking stuff since forever