Re: VCAP LAB

JASA1976 · ‎03-19-2012

I'm looking at etending my study and moving on to VCAP, but at the moment i can't afford the time to do the offical training coure and looking at going through the blue prints of the VCAP 4 for both design and administration, but using VSphere 5 with the aim of taking the exams towards the end of the year.

I currently have a Dell 2950 and a HP DL380 to use as hosts, but looking at recommendations for storage as I've found openfiler and Mirosoft iSCSI target to be quite poor performance wise once I have more than 2 or 3 VM's running. I also use these hosts for studying for other vendor exams so need them to be fairly reliable and for the storage to be of a reasonable level of performance.

Can anyone recommend a storage solution that is fairly reasonably priced that would be useable in a lab for the VCAP? At some point I'd also like to be able to use the storage for a lab to do the VCP-DT5 as well. I don't mind second hand equipment as its a lab.

AndreTheGiant · ‎03-19-2012

I suggest to use both iSCSI and NFS datastore to make practice.

You can use a Linux box or each virtual storage appliance that you may find.

Of course you cannot test VAAI or similar API.

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro

JASA1976 · ‎03-19-2012

Any suggetions on a cheap storage appliacne that I can use to test VAAI?

I was trying not to use a linux based VM running on one of the hosts as the storage device as i'd need to purcahse aditional storage for them. I'd rather have a seperate box and not a PC/erver that uses SATA disk due to performance.

GiuseppeG · ‎03-19-2012

Hp Lefthand VSA should support VAAI also in the trial version.

Giuseppe

ldelloca · ‎03-19-2012

You can use the HP P4000 VSA, it supports VAAI!

Beeing a VSA, performances are heavily based on the underlying hardware, but if you only need to see library in action, it's a great tool. I've also tested VASA libraries with it. The VSA is free to use for 60 days.

Luca.

JASA1976 · ‎03-19-2012

I'l give the HP VSA a go and see what the performance is like. It may be that I use this and purchase a couple of extra disks for my DL380 and create a storage network just for the VSA.

slaclair · ‎03-19-2012

Luca Dell'Oca wrote:
You can use the HP P4000 VSA, it supports VAAI!
Beeing a VSA, performances are heavily based on the underlying hardware, but if you only need to see library in action, it's a great tool. I've also tested VASA libraries with it. The VSA is free to use for 60 days.
Luca.

Oh! Was not aware of the VAAI support, excellent stuff.

VCAP5-DCD/DCA/CIA, VCA4-DT

Alwahidi · ‎03-23-2012

I am also preparing for my DCA and I'm using OpenFiler iSCSI/NFS appliance. I was aware that this wont give me the ability to test any vStorage APIs, so before choosing OpenFiler I went through the blue print and made sure VAAI isnt listed as an objective, or at least, not clearly.

I suspected that (Interaction between virtual & physical storage provisioning) is an objecive related to VAAI, but couldnt convince myself of so becuase physical provisioning would be an exam task that is dependent on HW vendor knowledge.

Am I overlooking something?

Abdul M. Alwahidi

scott28tt · ‎03-23-2012

I wouldn't worry about VAAI.

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jkagalbraith · ‎03-29-2012

I just stuck 24 GB of RAM in my workstation (w/ a quad core i7 920 processor), ran 3x5.5GB RAM, dual CPU ESX/ESXi VMs and a single FreeNAS VM. All of this runs off one 128GB Crucial M4 SSD and I havent had issues with running out of space (just thin provision everything, and if space gets tight from unreaclaimed space after deleting VMs, just storage VMotion to a fresh vdisk on the FreeNAS). The FreeNAS VM is also running on the same box. You will get best performance using iSCSI (by about 10x!) with this setup. I've also tried Openfiler, and again the NFS performance was not great, but the iSCSI performance was good.

The above setup all runs under Windows 7 64bit and VMware Workstation 8, but you could get slightly better performance on a dedicated box with ESXi5.

I've easilly run up to 20 VMs on this setup without issues.

vExpert 2013/14/15/16/17, VCAP4/5-DCD, VCP3/4/5/6 - Virtualisation Technobabble: http://www.tekhead.it/

admin · ‎03-31-2012

I would focus on advanced networking and remote management through the vMA instead of worrying about things such as VAAI/VASA.

mrudloff · ‎04-26-2012

Can't seem to stop thinking about getting the VCAP myself but nested setups don't do the job properly. They work in principal but not that great.

So I was thinking about buying at least two server, preferably three.

My current HP Microserver made me think (attached)

It clearly has enough oompf. But having only 8GB of RAM and such a low powered CPU probably means I can't do MUCH with it ..

Here's the plan

4 Microserver

1st - running Server 2008R2, ISCSI Target (to use as "SAN") and vCenter
2nd / 3rd - running vSphere 5, booting from USB, ISCSI storage attached to #1
4th - running vSphere 5, booting stateless, ISCSI storage attached to #1

Costs ... bear in mind, UK still offers cashback ...

4 Microserver = £999.04 - £400 cashback = £599.04
Ram upgrade = 8GB 4x £37 = £148
4GB flash drive = 3x £3.99 = £12.96

So the total bill (without licenses) : £759.96 / $1,227.06 including tax

Each Microserver here comes with 250GB HDD so three can be moved into the ISCSI / vCenter one.

Probably one of the cheaper options to build a proper VCAP lab... not just in terms of purchasing cost but also running cost - Dell 1950s are horrible when it comes to power consumption ... (AND noise for that matter)

JoshuaAndrewsVM · ‎04-26-2012

The performance of your lab isn't that critical - as long as it works you're good. Having access to a VAAI-capable storage will allow you to see how VAAI interacts with the hosts - the actual performance isn't critical.

I would certainly recommend a nested environment to prep for VCAP-DCA, there is nothing I can think of that can't be duplicated at some fashion in a nested world and it certainly is less expensive and the SAF* is considerably lower.

*SAF = Spouse Acceptane Factor

milton123 · ‎04-26-2012

Cost is a big one. Having shared storage is almost a must with virtualization if you want to take advantage of some of the more advanced features, such as high-availability [HA] and vMotion, that require shared storage. The cost of implementing a typical Fibre Channel solution for shared storage is typically pretty high. A NAS solution, on the other hand, can greatly reduce the amount of the expense of implementing a shared-storage solution because NAS uses common NICs instead of expensive Fibre Channel adapters. [NAS also] uses traditional network components instead of expensive Fibre Channel switches and cables.

Cheers, Yours Udin