MSA2000fc Suitability

[Flan5ter]

Hi All,

I am selling to a customer the following for implementation by me. I am VCP but this will be my first major live install. The customer is starting out small with about 10 machines to be VM'ed, but plans to go upto 40 VM's with 3-5 hosts. I have a test lab using an MSA1000 and have found that with just 2 hosts I regularly get HDD utilization warnings when a VM is using its hard disk in anger(i.e. installing an application or having data copied to it or off it.) Is the MSA2000fc the wrong storage device for this solutiuon, is it going to come back and bite me on the ass in 6 months. The customers budget has dictated this choice of SAN rather than going to an EVA SAN. I understand about capacity planning and have tryed to get the customer to understand but they don't want it. For the initial 10 P2V's I have no worries as the servers are low utilization and are currently running on one of two Free VMServers under windows without a problem. Let me know what you all think. The hardware is listed below.

470064-616 HP Proliant DL380G5 Xe5440QC/2.83GHz, 2Gb, SA P400/256 Server *2

399771-B21 HP Redundant PSU for above *2

458585-B21 HP Xe5440QC Processer Option Kit for DL580G5 *2

397415-B21 HP 8Gb RAM Kit (2 x 4Gb) for above *2

375861-B21 HP 72Gb 10K SAS SFF Hard Drives *4

435508-B21 HP NC364T Quad Port Gigabit Server Adapter PCIe *2

452153-B21 HP VM Management Pack License (instead of iLO License) *2

467937-B21 HP VMware VI3 Enterprise 2xCPU with 1yr 9x5 Support, Insight Control and Server Migration Pack *2

430345-B21 HP Virtual Centre Management Server with 1yr 9x5 Support *1

AE312A HP Dual-Port 4Gb FC PCIe Host Bus Adapter for Linux and Windows *2

AJ745A HP MSA2000fc 12-disk Array with dual enhanced controllers *1

AJ736A HP 300Gb Dual-Port SAS 15K Hard Drive *4

A7984A HP 8-port 4Gb FC SAN Switch *2

221692-B21 LC to LC MMF Fibre Cables *6

Regards

Flanster

[christianZ]

Basically I would say the MSA2000 would be not enough for 40 vms. Unfortunately nobody has tested it now in our performance thread ( http://communities.vmware.com/message/944142 ) - but the predecessor has a very poor performance - definitely to poor for 40 vms.

10 GB ram in one esx host could be to low by 2 hosts and 10 vms - when one host dies you have to run 10 vms on one host with 10 GB ram - how many ram do your 10 vms need ? Are 9 GB enough?

To determinate whether the MSA2000 could be enough for 40 vms one needs more details about ios utilization from ph. servers. It can work of course when all the vms will produce very low ios/sec.

[Flan5ter]

Thanks for your response. The amount of RAM is just to get them going, it would be increased down the line as needed. The 1500's where 2Mb fibre rather than 4Mb and the controllers in the 2000fc seem to be statistically of a much higher performance. I will also be using fixed paths to spread the IO load. I have found a lot of bad press on the 1500's in the forums, hence my concern about the 2000fc. Does anyone want to recommend a cost comparative SAN?

Regards

Flanster

[christianZ]

Me again. For small infrastructure I would always prefer iscsi storage/san (not so complex and expansive).

In that case I would get e.g. MD3000i from Dell and then the Dell servers also. Just my thought.

[flanster]

120 reads, has no one else got an opinion on this? Don't take offence.

Regards

Andy

[eliot]

Interested in your results - my first view is that 4 x sas drives isn't enough in terms of spindles. I would fill the shelf up if possible.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I would do a search for MSA2000 reviews... Some of the things I read there are definitely not good from a management perspective, but the performance is quite acceptable to them. I am looking to upgrade my MSA1000 and the management issues are persuading me to move away from the MSA2000.

I have customers using the MD3000i but they are less than 20 VMs at the moment. And another is using the NetApp S550 with quite a bit of success. They host 40+ VMs with one very large file server and one large database. So it gives respectable performance. I have been happy with my MSA1000 but am outgrowing it.

The # of spindles makes a huge difference in over all performance, as does the raid levels.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization