MSA2050

[Tonyissa87]

Hello every one
I had asked this question one time past
I have a MSA2050 with 4 hosts
I used ESXI 6.0 with host and I connected the hosts with FC 16Gbs , there are 8 sff hdd 1.8TB with storage
I need your help with the best configuration to get best performance
I do not care with HDD space
Only performance is what I want
What the best configure for:
Raid 10or 5or 6
do I make tow storage pool A&B or only one
Do I make only virtual disk to share with all hosts or I should make one virtual disk for every host
Please write
Thanks

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1 · Accepted solution]

It's not easy to design your setup with this much details.

Most important is wht type of application that you are going to execute. Next thing all 4 hosts will be in cluster or they will be individually take care one application.

If all 4 hosts taking care one application then I would suggest to create single Pool and create VDG with all 8 drives under this.

If you have multiple applications to handle then better to create two Pools and create 4 drive VDG per Pool. Let each pool takes care of application.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

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[Tonyissa87]

hello

thanks for your reply

no every host take care with one different application

you said in past post that creat 1 pool with 1 VDG will make peroformance better?

what should i do 1 pool or 2 

doea one pool with single vdg will offer more performane??

regards

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

1 pool with 1 VDG will be better if you deal with single application in one way because more drives brings more spindle count which increases performance.

In other way if you have multiple applications to handle then better to have two pool to handle because per controller volume ownership will help for more faster IO processing. Other if single pool or single controller to handle multiple applications then CPU usage will be more high, single Controller host pots will be loaded and increase latency.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

**************************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

Thanks 

about what i have application run , ihave these:

domain Server

exchange Server

Vcenter

Students Information System (web application) apache Server

Oracle Server

i have aslo some service like file sharing don not matter

what is important is the apache and oracle Server

Regards

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

I would suggest to keep two important application in two different Pools so that dedicated Controller CPU and cache should take care of the performance.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

***********************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

Thanks You

please another question 

what the kind of Raid you prefer?

raid 10 or raid 5??

thanks you

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

RAID10 always better in terms of performance compare to RAID5

There could be many comparison but you can consider below,

"RAID10-> It offers fantastic performance for random reads and writes because all operations occur in parallel on separate physical drives.

RAID5-> It also offers great read performance because of striping. However, writes are slower because of the overhead of calculating parity."

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

************************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

Many thanks

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

do you have any update or outstanding query?

Request you to please update on the forum so that everyone can get the update who are all following.

If you have no further query and you are satisfied with answers then kindly mark the forum as resolved.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

***********************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

so sorry for long time ti replay

i made two pool

pool A raid 10

Pooll B Raid 5

and one hdd as spare

the question:

1: if one of controller fail does the second will take care of both pool

2: the spare disk will be spare for two pool? or i need to had spare hdd for eatch poll

thanks

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

@Tonyissa87 

To answer your questions,

1: if one of controller fail does the second will take care of both pool

>> Yes if one controller fail then other controller will take care of the VDGs part of failed controller

2: the spare disk will be spare for two pool? or i need to had spare hdd for eatch poll

>> Spare gets configured at the system level. It's not for any Pool or VDG. So if you have Global spare or Dynamic spare configured then anywhere if drive failed and similar applicable drive already configured as spare then it will participate in reconstruction.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

*************************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

You mean that when I configure the spare disk I must tell the system which pool or VDG the separate dive belong to??

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

@Tonyissa87 

No I am saying you need to configure the drive as spare for the entire MSA. It's not specific for any Pool or VDG because in Virtual  Array there is no concept of dedicated spare. We have only Global spare and Dynamic Spare option.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

*************************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

Hello

sorry for more question......

i make 2 pools A&B

I make virtual volumes with Affinity (performance) for VM: (oracle-php-exchane)

and with Affinity (Archive) for (file sharing....etc)

does that true to keep performance od my SAN??

Thanks

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

@Tonyissa87 

Yes if you are looking for Performance for your volumes then at the time of VV creation you can select affinity feature as Performance.

Please note affinity feature doesn't mean volume pinning which means in case of affinity feature there is no hard rule that volume data will always move to some particular tier only.

In case of affinity feature if you select Performance option then this setting gives priority to data to be move to high performing tier. Not necessary it needs to be SSD tier only. If you have FC and NL drives only then volume data will try to move to FC tier provided FC tier having sufficient space.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

*************************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

well done my friend

i use veeam B&R but it does not support my MSA 2050 to backup snapshot

do you have another solution to do this?

how can i monitor IOPS on my SAN?

can i do that from SUM or with third party application?

thanks 

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

@Tonyissa87 

MSA 2050 having snapshot feature which you can utilize to take volume backups. You can refer SMU guide to get details.

You can refer Page no 136 onwards of SMU guide and go through it. You will learn how to check IOPs from SMU,

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=a00017707en_us

You can also refer CLI guide and check all statistical commands related to Performance which will surve your purpose as well,

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=emr_na-a00017709en_us

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

*************************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

Thanks

I know that MSA has snapshot Feature

but my question is:

how can i backup this snapshot to another place using Veeam B&R?

or any third party app to backup this snapshot

Regards

[SUBHAJIT KHANBARMAN_1]

@Tonyissa87 

Being an HPE Employee I can only suggest that MSA is already giving snapshot feature which is block level data backup technology. Apart from that if you want to keep data to somewhere else apart from your production MSA then you can buy another MSA and configure replication between them so that you can maintain redundant copy in other place as well. Now in case you have any issue then you can recover your data from the snapshot or from the replicated volume.

Regarding VEEAM I know they don't support MSA and why not that they need to answer as that's within their scope.

Regarding any other 3rd party application I can't comment because why will I give business to some other vendor when I know HPE have these solutions already available. However you can always consult with your Solution Architect or the designer who design your setup.

Hope this helps!
Regards
Subhajit

I am an HPE employee

If you feel this was helpful please click the KUDOS! thumb below!

*************************************************************************

[Tonyissa87]

Hello
After configure my msa 2050
Now I will go with ssd drive..
for our company
We have 4 Hp dl 380-G7 servers connected to San 2050
Each server run esxi
I want to run only one server on ssd
It is oracle server
So what is the best choice??
1 : to install ssd on the oracle server??
2: to install the ssd on San storage but in this case how can I specific the ssd for only oracle server??
Note : oracle server disk group is on pool A
All three other servers disk groups on pool B
Thanks