simultaneous infrastructure operations and the amount of shared storage?

[niceguy001]

I would like to know whether the simultaneous infrastructure operations' count is related to the amount of shared storage or not.

for VMmark 3.1, i'm planning to use iSCSI or SAN storage for the tests and if the simultaneous infrastructure operations is 4 in my lab environment, then should the amount of shared storage match this number(prepare 4 shared storage)?

Or the simultaneous infrastructure operations does not concern the  amount of shared storage at all?

is it only concern about the number of "DeployVMinfo"?

thanks in advance

[RebeccaG · Accepted solution]

The number of simultaneous infrastructure operations is not determined by the amount of shared storage. It's determined by the number of hosts and the number of tiles. The number of simultaneous infrastructure operations is half of the smaller of either the number of hosts or the number of tiles, rounded down to an integer. It is a built-in parameter of the benchmark which depends on the number of hosts and tiles you are running.

VMmark requires at least 2 shared vSphere datastores. This is to allow storage vmotion and xvmotion from one datastore to the other. So it's also OK to have only two shared datastores.

For each simultaneous infrastructure operation, you need to specify the target datastore in VMmark3.properties.

The way to do this looks like:

SVmotion/SVMotionLUNs = datastore1,datastore2

and also for parameters XVmotion/XVMotionLUNs, Deploy/DeployLUNs.
So with 4 simultaneous infrastructure operations, specify four datastores. These can all be the same datastore, or different datastores.

[niceguy001]

nice answer!

So, no matter how many "simultaneous infrastructure operation" counts in the VMmark 3.1 test, the amount of shared datastore can always be 2?

[RebeccaG]

That's right.

The only requirement for Storage vMotion and xVMotion is that the target VM must be located on a different datastore than the infrastructure operations target LUNs ("SVmotion/SVMotionLUNs", XVmotion/XVMotionLUNs", "Deploy/DeployLUNs")

This is because the source LUN and the target LUN have to be different.

For SVmotion, the target VM is Standby.

for XVmotion, the target VM is DS3WebA.

So, to use only two datastores, you would put all your Standby, DS3WebA, and template VMs on one datastore, e.g. Datastore1 and set SVMotionLUNs, XVMotionLUNs, DeployLUNs to Datastore2. The rest of the Tile VMs could be on either Datastore1 or Datastore2.

[niceguy001]

RebeccaG​ hi rebecca,

just encountered a problem which is,

I prepared two shared storage for the 4-tile turbo mode test(on 4 SUT hosts) and placed all the tile VMs(including Standby and DS3WebA) and 2 templates on the first datastore. meanwhile, the SVmotion/SVMotionLUNs, XVmotion/XVMotionLUNs and Deploy/DeployLUNs were  set to the second datastore.

when i perform test, it failed at the beginning with error messsage: VMmark3Msg : Error : sVMotion NotEnoughLUNs

but if i set both the two shared storage to Vmotion/SVMotionLUNs, XVmotion/XVMotionLUNs and Deploy/DeployLUNs, the test will failed in stage "VMmark Wkld Setup" with error message: ERROR MAIN : Exception Caught: SVMotion TargetDatastore Exception : Review Log and Configuration : Target and Source Datadtores are the same : exitSetting true

did i misunderstand the function of LUN parameters in VMmar3.properties file?

should i prepare a third datastore?

thanks!

[jamesz08]

The number of SVMotion LUNs will be the smaller of "# of Tiles / 2" or "# of Hosts / 2".  XVMotion and Deploy has the same requirements. Since you have 4 hosts and 4-tiles you will need a minimum of 2 LUNs specified.  You will also need 2 Deploy templates specified.

You can use the same LUN for this, you just need to list it twice, seperated by comma.