Describe your experience with the Storevault S500

[Brock]

Hello everyone,

I've spent three months now working with 2 ESX Servers (now running 3.01 and 3.0.2) managed by Virtual Center 2.0.2 with a Storevault S500 (using ISCSI) for storage. I have not had any catastrophic failures but every time I've changed store related configurations I've had to spend 4-5 hours to get the ESX servers to communicate with the Storevault. I've spoken to Storevault techs and VMware techs and they have both given me great advice regarding configuration changes, software upgrades, etc. Through this process I've upgraded the storevault to the latest firmware and client release and upgraded Virtual Center and one of the ESX servers to the highest patch levels. However after spending another 5 hours to connect a freshly reinstalled ESX server to the S500 I'm starting to question the worthiness of the device when used with VMware.

I have trouble every time I rebuild or introduce an ESX server to the storevault, where I can't seem to configure the ESX server to view and use the LUN on the storevault. The lun that I am currently using on the storevault is a "windows" type lun. I did this in error when I first created the LUN, but at the time I had no problems connecting the first ESX Server to the lun. The problems started when I got the 2nd ESX server running. Most of the time the storevault does not let me add the initiator of the new ESX server to the preexisting initiator group on the Storevault. The first time I fixed it involved the same non-logical steps that fixed it the last time. The tech and I recreated initiator groups, renamed initiator, and created test LUNs multiple times before we finally got it working. During that event we spent a frightening hour where we could not reconnect either ESX server to the LUN. The tech didn't know for sure what the cause was at the time, and today the tech did not know why we had problems either. The only remaining lead provided to me by a storevault tech was to back up the VMs onto another location, delete all the luns on the storevault, and then create a new lun, this time with a type of "vmware". Then I'll hopefully be able to gracefully and quickly connect this new LUN to the ESX Servers, and move the VMs back to the LUN..

I'll let everyone know what happens after I recreate the LUN with the vmware type, hopefully everything will work. The frustrating part is that once the ESX servers can see the storevault everything runs fine. If anyone has used the S500 please post your good (or bad) experiences!

Thanks!

[JGan]

Hey Brock. We have a S500 also and had similar issues. The SVM software that comes with the S500 is slow and often, not so intuitive. We've been running fine for a while now, but adding Luns is always a trick. All the folks I talk to who know NetApp are always stunned once they look at the StoreVault... expecting more.

[ScottyWed]

I am looking at purchasing an S500 for our VI3 deployment. My goal is to have two Dell PE2950's hooked up to it. I like the fact that it can work as a NAS and a SAN at the same time. Does anyone currenlty operate theirs this way? If so, how is it working?

[Brock]

For a while i had a few VMS running off of the NFS share on the storevault while the rest were running on the ISCSI LUN. So far we haven't had any non-management issues with it at all. Aside from all the time spent trying to get the proper LUN types and Initiator groups set up its performed well. The VMs have always been stable (not sure about performance since we haven't put much of a load on it yet).

[JGan]

Overall our S500 has been rock solid. I spoke to their techs two days ago and the NEW VERSION of OnTap and SVM3 will support NIC teaming and Load Balancing. That will be quite the boost for SAN performance. But we'll see once it comes out.

I wouldn't go w/ 2950's unless you have to. Save some space and go for the 1950's unless you're partial to 2U. You don't need any HDD on your Servers if you're going to use the SAN w/ ESX with all its bells and whistles. Just my 2 cents... but I know because I have too many 2850's and 2950's already!

Slowly but surely we'll see more standard OnTap features slip into the SV... it's bound to happen.

[Brock]

Ah new software will hopefully fix things. I know the latest release I updated my storevault to allowed for active/passive NIC teaming which is better than nothing! I had tried to set up multiple ISCSI paths for redundancy that way but the ESX servers would only display 1 available path. It would be nicer if I could have an active/active setup and use channel-group on the cisco switches.

[JGan]

You know ... I'm going to call StoreVault again right now. The guy said "end of this week" for release on new software and that was on Monday. I mean, SV2.x really stinks man... I'd rather use CLI half the time.

[JGan]

Yes... by tomorrow afternoon the new version should be on the site of OnTap for Storevault and SVM3.0

[JGan]

3.0SVM and new OnTap is out for S300 and S500... Just login to grab the stuff. Does support Nic teaming and load balance.

[gicti]

Hi,

I'm considering using the S500 or S300 and was wondering the workloads your putting on these units. If you've got a moment, if you could describe your configurations. I'm unsure if NFS or iSCSI is the way to go.....

Amount of drives is also a question I have since this is not the typical RAID configuration that I'm used to....

Most of the configurations that I'll be doing are 3 ESX servers max with environments of 75 users or less with SBS 2003 and SQL 2005........

Much appreciated....

[JGan]

We have 10 VM's running. Our top two in are SQL and a logging server. We're still keeping an eye on performance with the SQL machine, as it has been in question, especially as the load increases. So far no issues though. Not many metrics yet on true performance data.

We're maxed on drives w/ the S500 and also have the NFS license. Hope that helps.

[JGan]

Upgraded to SVM3.0 and new version of OnTap. Went well EXCEPT... You can't use Linux LUNs with VMWARE for VMFS!!! As a result, all my machines that had Linux type luns are without their RDM drives right now! It's all in preparation for 3.5 of ESX.. .but geez

[Brock]

I had alot of problems with Windows Luns not being accesible from ESX 3.02 ESX servers. I eventually got it working after recreating Initiator groups for a few hours!

[virtualadm8]

*_Hi Brock_ *

Let me understand you.

Do you recommend using the s500 (with the new firmware) as ISCSI storage with ESX 3.0.2?

Regards

[Brock]

The only problem I've had so far with the storevault has been the Storevault Manager software. For me at least its been painfully slow and cumbersome to use, and as I described earlier here (as well as in other posts), I've had a rough time setting up initiator groups so that the ESX servers can access the LUNs. That said, I've never had the storevault fail or had any of the VMs fail because of it. I don't have much of a load on it, with 11 unimpacted VMs so I'm interested to see how it performs once we move more servers and more people on to it.

Edit- I can't speak for the new firmware. I'm one revision behind which allowed for active/passive NIC failover. I'm going to wait until Friday to do that in case the ESX servers lose the ability to access their LUNs (I'm afraid for a "Windows" LUN that VMs are installed on).

[JGan]

SVM is terrible... I thought 3.0 would be faster, but it's still a shotty GUI. The boxes are great, but I agree that my issues have been mostly with SVM.