Storage best practise for HP EVA SAN for Vshpere4.0

[rucky]

All, storage experts.

Some of you might be using HP EVA in your environmet, so could you please shed some light on the below? I have also posted in HP forums, but I would like to know thoughts from this side of thre community as well. (the answer can be from vshpere side), or in general - with SAN's that use disk virtualisation (aggregates or disk groups) - rather than old EMC style (storage group, raid group and LUN). and perfomance wise what can be done at the Vshpere level.

Would some of you would be able to shed some light on below.

With EVA's it uses disk virtualisation aggergates right, for the Vshpere environment what would be best practise which would have a combination of SQL, windows, web and other I/O intensive servers.

Basically we have 2 disk groups, 1 for FATA and one for FCAL --- we have 86 - FCAL disks (558GB) where all the VM's reside. most of which are Vraid5, there are approx 52 Vdisks (LUNS), vraid5 mostly, and we have around 110 virtual servers (probablly about 150-200 vmdk's) which are all sorts sql, web, windows, backups

So the question is - is one disk group FCAL with 86 disks is good enough? from the perfomance i cant see it being good enough but whar are you guys reccomending storage wise?

Any tools for EVA so that I can monitor if the disk are being Thrased?

Any sizing or best practise guide for Vshpere4 (combo of all abov servers types)

or would it be best to create differnt disk groups for diff server types (SQL, web etc)??

Please advise experts..

Cheers

[EdWilts]

rucky wrote:

Basically we have 2 disk groups, 1 for FATA and one for FCAL --- we have 86 - FCAL disks (558GB) where all the VM's reside. most of which are Vraid5, there are approx 52 Vdisks (LUNS), vraid5 mostly, and we have around 110 virtual servers (probablly about 150-200 vmdk's) which are all sorts sql, web, windows, backups

So the question is - is one disk group FCAL with 86 disks is good enough? from the perfomance i cant see it being good enough but whar are you guys reccomending storage wise?

Any tools for EVA so that I can monitor if the disk are being Thrased?

Any sizing or best practise guide for Vshpere4 (combo of all abov servers types)

or would it be best to create differnt disk groups for diff server types (SQL, web etc)??

Lots of questions, and I'll take a stab at answering them.

First, you want as many disks in your disk group as you can get.  Don't create smaller disk groups because you'll reduce your effective IOPS.  With 86 disks in your disk group, you'll be capable of roughly 15K IOPS assuming they're 15k RPM spindles.  You'll find this documented in the HP Best Practices guide for EVA.  You'll definitely want to read http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-2185ENW.pdf

There are two ways to measure your performance - you can either use the EVAperf tool on your EVA management appliance and look at the EVA details (and it's an ugly, ugly tool with a LOT of detail) or you can use the guest performance data within vCenter.