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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

equalogic ps4000

any feedback on the equalogic iscsi san? how is it compared to fc?

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

The PS4000 series has "only" 2 iSCSI gigabit NIC for each controllers (and controllers are active/standby).

So seems slower compared to a FC4 solution.

Usually the bottleneck are not in the front-end "channels", but in the back-end part Smiley Happy

I can say that it perform well and, for example, a PS4000XV with RAID50 runs well a company IT infracture with around 25 VMs, with SQL, Exchange, AD, custom ERPs, ... for more than 150 uses.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal

Hello.

I can second what Andre says.  I have two of the PS4000E running RAID 6 out in the field and have been very impressed so far.  For a SMB, these units are pretty good.

Good Luck!

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

really depends what's your requirement. HP P4000 is worth looking too .. iSCSi could be 10Gbe if needed to ..

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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

we have 2 gig cables connected to one controller. but only one nic is actually active right? the other one is just standby?

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vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal

This depends on how it is set up.  Typically the NICs are enabled or disabled.  Is one of your connections plugged into the Management port?  When I deploy these EQ units, I set both ethernet interfaces as enabled and then use the MEM plugin on vSphere.  I also set up the dedicated management network to separate the traffic.

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

the dedicated mgmt network is disabled. I only have eth0 and eth1 connected with 2 ips. both are enabled. does this mean they are both load balancing and active?

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vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal

How is your vSwitch set up?  Did you install the MEM plugin?

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

we have 2 gig cables connected to one controller. but only one nic is actually active right? the other one is just standby?

For each volume yes... (exept if you use Eql multipath plugin).

But you can create more volume and have both NIC working.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

have not installed the mem plugin yet. since I have only 1 vlan, I bundled sc, vmkernel and iscsi into one vswitch. with 3 nics. (1 is 100mbps).

then in the properties of the ISCSI portgroup under nic teaming, I changed the override vswitch failover order to use only the 2 gigabit nics as active. moved the 100mb nic to unused.

this is the same config i have on the vmkernel portgroup (vmotion)

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

The vmkernel ports configuration for eql is particular (you need to bind all port to the iSCSI storage adapter).

See: http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=8453

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

do i have to map a physical nic to a vmkernel port? I onlly have 5 nics (1 for mgmt). that leaves 4 gig nics. i will need 2 for vms, can i use the other 2 for vmotion, and 2 iscsi vmkernel?

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

do i have to map a physical nic to a vmkernel port?

Yes. Better if is 1:1 mapping.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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clemence
Contributor
Contributor

Yeah this documentation is well written and this setup works fine. I also used the 1:1 advice for VMkernel and round robin access.

I have a PS4000X (600G*8 SAS 10K) and it's great for its price.

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azn2kew
Champion
Champion

Dell Equallogic PS4000 series are great for small office with medium workloads, so it really depends what you're planning to virtualized.  For iSCSI SAN solutions, there are quite a fews that are competitive such as Compellent, HP Lefthand and the new greatest EMC VNX/VNXe series which is way off the roof when you started to quote on the price but worth all the innovations on VNX appliances due to speed and ease of use with Unisphere management.

I've 4 small/medium customers using Dell Equallogic PS4000 series and they ran just fine due to general/medium application workloadsand carefully designed, quick deployment and provisioning as well as the built in software piece is really good and easy. Dell Equallogic has 10GBe solutions if you're planning for larger scale and has 10GBe infrastructure it should runs great too.

If you require redundancy and disaster recovery, it works great with VMware SRM but plan it with the vendor to make sure you have the best practices configured for virtualization.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!! Regards, Stefan Nguyen VMware vExpert 2009 iGeek Systems Inc. VMware vExpert, VCP 3 & 4, VSP, VTSP, CCA, CCEA, CCNA, MCSA, EMCSE, EMCISA
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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

can you look at this setup and see if its ok. I just cannot do a 1:1 mapping right now

esxcfg-vswitch shows my setup

Switch Name    Num Ports   Used Ports  Configured Ports  MTU     Uplinks  
vSwitch0       64          8           64                9000    vmnic0,vmnic1,vmnic2
  PortGroup Name      VLAN ID  Used Ports  Uplinks  
  ISCSI2              0        1           vmnic1,vmnic2
  ISCSI1              0        1           vmnic1,vmnic2
  VMkernel            0        1           vmnic1,vmnic2
  Service Console     0        1           vmnic0,vmnic1,vmnic2
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clemence
Contributor
Contributor

I think it's not recommended to put service console with iscsi network.

Is it possible for you to add another NIC ? Do you plan to use vmotion too ? It would be easier to design your vswitchs with 6 nics.

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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

any idea on how to install the equalogic mem plugin. I am reading the pdf but even the query command is asking me to provide the address of the esx server. I already have vc added to the vma so there should be no authentication issues

perl setup.pl --query --server="-esx2.xxx.com"

You must provide a --vihost parameter when --server is a vCenter Server.
[vi-admin@vma EqualLogic-ESX-Multipathing-Module][vc.xxx.com]$ perl setup.pl --query --server="esx2.xxx.com"

perl setup.pl --query --vihost=esx2.xxx.com

You must provide the address of an ESX/ESXi host with the --server parameter.

thanks

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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

so I moved my iscsi + mgmt from standard to dvs. question i have is is there a command line to enable jumbo frames on the dvswitch as opposed to using the gui?

I was able to do it with esxcfg-vmknic but the dvSwitch and physical nics remains at 1500

does this makes sense?

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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

in case anyone had the same problem I had to run this command

./setup.pl --install --username=root --password=xxxx --vihost=esxserver.xxx.com --server esxserver.xxx.com

had to use vihost and server

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