VMware vCloud Director Storage Infrastructure design considerations

[truetaurus]

If I was designing the storage component of vCD, what are the components involved or what should I consider using?

Would using something like EMC VNX 5300 be ok? What protocols should I consider? iSCSI?

Would I create 2 storage pools, one for management and one for the resources?

Would there be any storage tiering?

What would be the front end connectivity ports used?

[TeKilla79]

hi truetaurus,

you can use any supported storage or storage protocol, your storage is supported since vSphere 5.0 U3...(VMware Compatibility Guide: Storage/SAN Search (keyword VNX5300))

storage pool for vcloud vms:

create a LUN attached via FC or iSCSI to your ESXi Hosts (vCloud), then create a datastore and add a userdefined capability.

then enable storage profiles on this cluster and create a storage profile with the userdefined capabilty and sync this with the vcloud director.

now you can add the storage profile to an existing or new provider vdc and org vdc...

storage pool for mgmt:

create a LUN attached via FC or iSCSI to your ESXi Hosts (MGMT), then create a datastore and deploy or move your mgmt vms to this datastore

i hope this helps

greets from austria

martin

[truetaurus]

In terms of the disks, what would you recommend? how many disks and what types/sizes?

[abhilashhb]

No. of Disks totally depends on your requirement. if you want to go with diffrent tiers of storage you will have to buy SATA/FC/SSD disks depending on your requiremnet. Put them in certain storage profiles and let the user choos what kind of workload his VM has to sit on and also bill them accordingly.

As i mentioned Size is totally left to your usage and requirement.

[truetaurus]

i see thanks. Any recommendations for 600 virtual desktops at 30 IOPS each?

[abhilashhb]

Like how you need an architect to design your virtualization environment, an architect has to sit and size the storage. For example you need 30 IOPS for 600 machines. That is 600*30 at an average which is 18000. A FC disk of 15K RPM disk of 2TB would give around 180 IOPS per disk. So if you have a RAID 5 Configuration you will need around 140 Disks. Again this is a very rough estimation. It also depends on the percentage of read and write, penalty and many other things.