EMC Storage and Performance

[tacticsbaby]

Greetings,

We are currently evaluating EMC VNX storage for our organizations View project. Through testing we found the VNX the be a great performer for VDI. We have decided to go with VNX and we are looking at a rather large price, almost 300K. Long story short I would like to know what components and features we can do without so we can reduce our cost if possible while maitaining a high level of performance. Thanks in advance.

[mcowger]

Most important to keep:

Controller level (5300 vs. 5500, etc)

FASTCache

Diskcount

The rest (snaps, etc wont help as much)

(disclaimer: I'm an EMC employee - if you want to talk to a VDI expert from EMC, PM me and I will get you in touch with our vSpecialist team).

[tacticsbaby]

Thanks for the information. Just curious when you listed controller version are you suggesting higher is better e.g. 5300 - 5500.

[mcowger]

Higher numbers have more cache and faster CPUs.

[MaxStr]

Hey mcowger, I have a VNX 5300 performance question. We just hooked up a new Cisco UCS system (over 10gb FCoE). I ran the benchmark from the SAN performance thread (link to my post here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/2183191#2183191).

In summary, the read IO/s were over 28K, but the random read/write IO/s were about 1K. Latency was about 2ms for reads, 40ms for random.

We don't have SSD or fast cache yet, and there is no other VM running on that LUN.

Do those numbers look right to you? It seems to me the reads are too high and the writes are too low.

[mcowger]

That read count is possible if you have a working set that fits in cache and its 100% read.

The write performance does seem low, but that can be impacted by a huge number of things:

1) Improper R/W cache settings

2) Improper tiering settings

3) Improper LUN ownership.

I'd def. give your EMC TC (or VAR equivalent) a call to see whats going on.