Storage tier of VMDK managed by vCloud director

[Techstarts]

Hi All,

I understand we cannot use storage tiering of VMDK of VMs when managed by vCloud director.

At vSphere layer we can always separate vmdk's on different datastore.

e.g. As for any database it is standard practice to separate Log,tempdb and database on three different VMDK and these three different VMDK's are present on three different datastore.

This is not possible in vCloud director, all disks must go on single datastore.

Can you confirm if my understanding is correct?

Also what are better ways to achieve in order to ensure database right kind of performance

[IamTHEvilONE]

This is correct.  vCloud will place an entire VM on a single datastore.  This is true regardless of using or not using Storage DRS.

[iceman76]

There is nothing more to add from the vCloud Director side. But i doubt that vCD or even vSphere is the right place to deal with your requirements. That concept of guest disks mapped to vmdks on different datastores (LUNs) just tries to mimic the behaviour of hosts and storage from the "old" pre-virtualization era 😉 If you try and build that with your traditional storage you will end up with 100s of LUNs, alignment problems and a management nightmare probably.

What you need is a vm-aware storage solution, one that is better aligned with virtualization, one that guarantees "Storage QoS". And that goes further than "automated storage tiering" which is offerd by some storage vendor.

Vmware itself is pushing that - just take vVols, vSan and the likes. Have you heard something about Tintri ? I had some guys from them here for a presentation last month, and it was quite impressive. The whole concept fits into a virtualized world

Just my opinion - but our next storage system will be "vm-aware"

But i have a use case for having disks from different storage-profiles within one vm. One that can't be handled by the storagesystem. We want to provide our customers with an easy "backup" solution. Just add a second disk to the vm. The disk resides on a SATA/NL-SAS storage system in another datacenter. The customer can copy his data (or use backup software) to backup his data. If the primary storage fails, the backuped data is still there.

[Techstarts]

iceman76 wrote:

There is nothing more to add from the vCloud Director side. But i doubt that vCD or even vSphere is the right place to deal with your requirements. That concept of guest disks mapped to vmdks on different datastores (LUNs) just tries to mimic the behaviour of hosts and storage from the "old" pre-virtualization era 😉 If you try and build that with your traditional storage you will end up with 100s of LUNs, alignment problems and a management nightmare probably.

I'm sorry, I don't agree with you about pre-virtualization era. Please check all reference architecture and design guidelines white paper from vmware and vmware world sessions,all strongly recommended to separate database disks as you do on physical world. We don't need hundred of LUNs unless we have 100's of database. I was only referring one Database server. You may check How to virtualized business critical application guidelines from vmware

[iceman76]

Yes - sure it is recommended and best-practice. We are configuring it like that, too. But why ? Only because the storage system does not not anything about the vmdks. It is the LUN-Concept that dates back to the pre-virtualization era.