IBM Blades + 3PAR Help

[jchavez]

All,

We are planning to upgrade our IBM Chassis which have 2 Nortel switches one used for Production and the second for our iSCSI storage.

We have 4 IBM HS21 Blades running on only 1 physical NIC. VMs and SC are in the same network and iSCSI seperated by VLAN.

The plan is to replace the Nortel switches with 2 Brocade 20 port 8GB FC switches and 2 BNT 10 port 10GBe switches and add 4 more blades HS22.

3PAR will connect to the blades directly via FC for storage and plan to have multiple VLANs to seperate traffic via 10GBe.

iSCSI will also be directly connected to 3PAR for NL storage for the Dev and non critcal VMs.

Need help designing the network and storage:

1 Cluster of 4 HS22 blades for critical production VMs (vlan 1, vlan 2 vlan 3)

1 Cluster of 2 HS21 blades for non critical VMs (vlan 4, vlan 5)

1 Cluster of 2 HS21 blades for dev VMs (vlan 6)

Any help\guidance is much appreciated.

[DSeaman]

We have a 3PAR array and love it! With the forthcoming VAAI firmware update, my suggestion is to go with 2TB LUNs and make them thin provisioned. Assuming you are running the latest 3PAR firmware and management tools, then configure an ESX host set for each cluster within the 3PAR array. You can then configure virtual volume sets, and present the VLUN set to your ESX host sets. Drastically reduces clicking and chances for human error. What LUNs you configure in each VLUN set depends on your design. For example, you may have an ISO image LUN you want all clusters to access.

I'd only present four paths to each ESX host to the 3PAR. Be sure to distribute across controller nodes and ports, evenly. You can also enable round robin I/O on the LUNs for better I/O path balancing. I haven't used 3PAR iSCSI, so I can't give you any best practices for that.

Be sure to check out the 3PAR VMware integration guide for more tips!