ESXi V5.0 U1 - Enable SIOC on production NFS datastores?

[82Titleist]

I have been reading about implementing SIOC on our NFS datastores due to a known issue per the following KB:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=2016122&sliceId=2&doc...

I have opened a support ticket and have decided to enable SIOC for our datastores, although support was unable to tell me if this was something that I could do on production.  My assumption would be that adding this additional configuration would not be an issue, although I'm having issues confirming that.  Has anyone else enabled SIOC on live production datastores?

Thanks,

Jeff

[sflanders]

SIOC is fully supported with NFS as of vSphere 5.0. You should have no problems running it on a production system, however you should understand how it works and how it might impact your systems. As with any chance you should fully test outside of production before making the change.

Here are some references you might find useful:

* https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-esx-vcenter-server-50-new-features.html

* http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/03/debunking-storage-io-control-myths.html

* http://cormachogan.com/2012/09/17/vsphere-5-1-storage-enhancements-part-8-storage-io-control/

* http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10207

* http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022091

[frankdenneman]

Hi Jeff,

If you are using a Netapp I would recommend you enable SIOC as this solves the problem customers are experiencing on their NetApp system in ESX 5.x.

[82Titleist]

Thank you both for your replies.  I greatly appreciate it.

My main question is if I can enable this on a running datastore safely.  I have done it in my lab, and I didn't run into any issues.  Although, I just wanted to see if anyone had done this while on the fly. 

Production loads should be just fine in terms of latency, but we do want to enable SIOC to circumvent the NFS disconnect issues.

Jeff

[sflanders · Accepted solution]

Yes you can safely enable SIOC to an active datastore with running VMs.

[82Titleist]

Thank you very much for clarification of what I saw in my lab.

-Jeff

[ross_cav]

I'm just about to do a similar thing, how did you go with it? No issues at all, just a simple click on the enable option and all was good?

[82Titleist]

Yes. We enabled on all NFS datastores without any issues. You may want to verify your datastore latency prior to enabling. The default sioc setting is 30ms, so in most cases you are fine.

Jeff Inouye

Sent from iPhone