Multiple Storage Tiers attached to each VM.

[nellermann]

We are running vCloud Director 5.1.2 currently and it seems fine for our small customers with little sophistication within their VM deployments. Now we are struggling with our larger customers that want more VM control, but don't warrant dedicated VMware clusters and vCenters. We have been managing very large and complex IaaS for Platform as a Service and ASP vendors for many years on VMware as a VSPP. Our average VM is between 24GB to 32GB of RAM, runs a database service such as MySQL or MS SQL and has multiple data storage tiers attached to it within vCenter/vSphere, such as our 'Standard', 'High Performance' and our 'Archive/Type II' data tier. We use Storage Profiles and Storage Clusters with minimal direct virtual disk assignments. Each database VM can easily can range from 4TB to 20+TB. The storage tiers are completely different storage platforms with different performance capabilities and costs. It would be stupid to place internal backups into a hybrid SSD/HDD platform!

Our storage performance requirements are very high and what I have read about in other posts about "VM or Cloud ready storage" platforms is a joke with the current vendors on the market, we have tested or reviewed all of them they fail to meet our customer's performance requirements. Most only perform for short periods of time with bursts of performance or cache, then it tanks. That argument aside, how in the world can we have a VM within vCloud Director have multiple tiers of storage? Not to mention, allowing the VM's VMDK's to reside on multiple volumes within the same storage tier. I can't imaging managing the IO contention of a database's multiple IO workloads into a single VMware datastore.

Hopefully someone can shed some light on our dilemma. Thanks!

[cfor]

You can't out of the box.

We have addressed the backup issue before by using a NFS mount from inside the guest VM's to a cheap storage location.

I think part of the issue is the thought that cloud should not need lots of tiers, the storage platform should be able to be smart and adapt with cache and tiers not the management platform.  This way you have tiers in the management layer based on very few items (compliance ect.) but performance and cost savings is handled by your storage platform.

That all said -- depending on how unsupported you want to go... storage profiles in vCloud are used for placement; once an item is placed from my testing a VMDK can have a profile changed in vcenter and be storage vmotioned and work...  However this does get into the unsupported area so you will want to do some testing and make sure the results are as you expect.

[Techstarts]

Even I'm looking for this answer

here is similar thread ->https://communities.vmware.com/message/2294524#2294524

My recommendation: Don't go with vCloud Director instead Go for vCAC  and achieve multi-tenancy at network layer.

[nellermann]

most of the multitenancy is network based already with or without vCAC or vCloud Director. As a VSPP, we don't have vCAC from what I am reviewing in our latest version of the program guide and vCloud Director is part of the "vCloud" program with vCloud connector, etc. 

[nellermann]

I love the idea of some utopian storage platform that magically tiers data in real-time and can scale and grow incrementally for the various tiers, oh and support hundreds or more of contending workloads from random custom platforms with high IOps and high bandwidth. Must some how be affordable, must have more reliability than 5-nines.  When someone finds it, please send a POC over my way! The last one we looked at was using NFS, looked good as an almost knockoff to Isilon architecture, but any one file was only stored on a single drive and mirrored to another drive for redundancy. Therefore max IO per VM was speed of a single drive! Are you kidding me? Our VMs can push 20,000 IoPS and more to a single virtual disk. Sorry, gone off topic, but this helps to illustrate my point of needing more storage control at the Service Provider side of director.  

[anupam0]

> how in the world can we have a VM within vCloud Director have multiple tiers of storage?

vCloud Director, as offered in VSPP, will support disk level storage tiers going forward, enabling this use case.

[nellermann]

anupam0, where did you learn about this information? How do we activate the feature, with our VSPP Keys? We just upgraded from vCD 5.1 to vCD5.5.

Thanks!