You run XIV for vSphere workloads in your datacenter. You love it. Your performance is good. You enjoy stability, scalability, and ease of management. The hardware and software are reliable. IBM support is fantastic.
So...please tell me more! I read all kinds of positive and constructive things about storage solutions from HP, NetApp, EMC, Compellent, etc. I read very little from vSphere environments that are running on XIV. Google and VMTN searches yield far fewer search results with XIV than all other storage solutions.
You want to tell me all about XIV and what you love about it. You know you do... Thanks in advance!
True, XIV doesn't currently support VAAI but I'm sure it will soon (https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/anthonyv/entry/vmware_vsphere_4_1_vaai_and...)
This current lack of support hasn't caused us any issues in our environment as we're using vStorage API with NetBackup and the backups are working great, no agents and good performance
My personal view is that I think XIV is a great fit with VMWare as it makes the whole infrastructure so easy to manage and scale as required. XIV is never going to be the fastest performing storage in the world, but I don't see that as an issue as if you really need the true high end performance for your servers/storage, generally you wouldn't be putting those types of servers into VMWare anyway.
The other great thing about XIV is that it lifts some of the smoke and mirrors around managing storage as no longer can the SAN guys complain about how hard their lives are as with XIV it's so easy
IBM now has VAAI support on XIV.
More info. here: http://aussiestorageblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/vaai-and-xiv-its-here/
I have some great news regarding VAAI support for XIV.
Let me detail the current situation:
So what should your plan be?
You can go larger on your data stores, in the XIV console you would set them to 2181 for a perfect 2TB lun. VAAI in 10.2.4.a and the appropriate drivers will give you a better bang for your buck. I'd use 8MB block as well.
there is a newly released vcenter plugin that gives you the ability to manage/create luns from vcenter as well.