vSphere 5 storage pools

[congrexit]

I have a question regarding storage pools.

We have an Enterprise license for our ESX servers, is it possible to create storage pools without enabling “Storage DRS” witch requires Enterprise Plus license?

And is there any documentation for best practise for creation of Storage Pools?

[PduPreez]

Welcome to the community

You will not be able to set up SDRS Pools in Ent

I guess you want to do this for admin purposes to group Storage together. Example Gold Silver Bronze

I will suggest to use folders and put you Datastores in there, and better still, include the Datastore Role in the naming convention

Regarding the best practices, have a look atthe following link on page 57

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.0.pdf

Please award points by clicking helpful/correct

[congrexit]

I want to use storage pools to minimize the waste of free space each volume need for snapshots, currently I need to have 10% free space per volumes for the snapshots. When we have + 20 volumes of expensive san space this becomes a issue.

Any other recommendation how we could minimize this free space each volume needs?

[PduPreez · Accepted solution]

Hi

Pushing your datastore utilization to the limits are very risky and could lead to a full datatstore which will down all the VMs on it.

If you do not use VMware snapshots at all this might be a different story, but you always need to be careful on datastore usage.

Having said that, here is my 2 cents on ways to limit the datastore wastage.

For example say you have 20 x 1TB LUNs, you keep the 10% which is 100GB per LUN and gives you a total of 2TB

First of all you could use thin provisioning on you storage side.

- This will mean you only use storage needed on the Array, but you need to be careful on the overcomitments

- This will allow you to use the reserve 500GB unused space for the 20 LUNs and use the rest for other purposes.

Second of all you could move all your VMs vswap files to a dedicated cheaper storage.

- You need to be careful with this, because if there are Memory contention, you could have huge performance impacts.

Third point you could use thin provisioning on the VMs. Only use thin on either storage or VMs, not both

- With this you could allocate less storage from the array and overcomit Storage on the VMware side.

- This also need to be monitored closely and a overcommit alarm would be recomended to monitor this.

See http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-DynamicStorageProv-WP-EN.pdf

Please award points if you find this correct/helpful :smileycool:

[congrexit]

We only using snapshots during backups as we run virtual aware backup software, so one alternative you suggested regarding moving the snapshot to a specific volume could be an alternative but at the same time adds complexity to the environment.

Using thin provision on storage or VMs adds penalty and is not recommended by VMware for production environment.

That’s why I was excited about storage pools, to only utilize 10% free space for snapshots for the storage pool instead of each volume. Too bad it’s only for Enterprise Plus licenses.

Anyway thanks so much for the help.

[rlund]

Thin provisioning within VMWare doesn't have any penalizing performance hit with the current version. And depending on your storage , it should not either.

Roger lund

VMUG Leader

vExpert

[congrexit]

Hi rlund,

Can you point me to any document stating that vSphere5 not penalizing performance with thin provisioning enabled on VMs?

[rlund]

Sure,

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_thinprov_perf.pdf

http://www.vladan.fr/thick-or-thin-that-is-a-question/

Hope that helps.

Roger Lund

VMUG Leader

vExpert.