Peter.Learmonth at netapp
Feb 13, 2008, 1:16 PM
Post #10 of 13
(412 views)
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Hi Jeff!
Make your calls! ;-)
ESX does support thin-provisioned VMDKs. They are default in NFS
datastores. You have to use vmkfstools from the command line to create
thin-provisioned VMDKs in VMFS. Either way, when you clone a thin VM in
VirtualCenter, it makes a thick clone.
There is also thin provisioning on the NetApp side, which some customers
are also using successfully (at least one that I know of for over a
year).
Enjoy!
Peter
________________________________
From: jeff.mery[at]ni.com [mailto:jeff.mery[at]ni.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:48 AM
To: Glenn Walker
Cc: Daniel Keisling; Bill Holland; owner-toasters[at]mathworks.com;
toasters[at]mathworks.com
Subject: RE: De-dup'ing Primary Storage
Like the others, thanks for the info. At one point, A-SIS wasn't
supported in true "production" roles, meaning in a Tier-1 use case. Has
that changed recently? If so, I think I need to make some phone calls
=).
On the thin provisioning - ESX doesn't support thin-provisioned VMDK's
yet. Workstation does that by default, but I'm not sure about VMware
Server. Hopefully ESX is coming soon though. I would still imagine a
fair amount of reclaimed space once ESX does come through. While you'll
no longer de-dupe the white space in a VMDK, I'd imagine you'll still
de-dupe all the base OS commonalities.
Jeff Mery - MCSE, MCP
National Instruments
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"Allow me to extol the virtues of the Net Fairy, and of all the
fantastic
dorks that make the nice packets go from here to there. Amen."
TB - Penny Arcade
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From: "Glenn Walker" <ggwalker[at]mindspring.com>
To: "Daniel Keisling" <daniel.keisling[at]austin.ppdi.com>, "Bill
Holland" <hollandwl[at]gmail.com>, <toasters[at]mathworks.com>
Date: 02/13/2008 12:37 PM
Subject: RE: De-dup'ing Primary Storage
________________________________
Just keep in mind that we were using IOMeter to test, not actual real
world workloads - we were also very much disk bound in our testing. If
you are neither using IOMeter (ie, a real-world workload) nor disk
bound, I can't foresee it being a huge problem.
We'll be testing with NFS dedupe a bit later today and I'll gladly share
that info if you want. Same number of disks, so same stipulations
exist.
And because the question did come up, the VMWare server guy didn't build
the VMDKs with thin provisioning, so it may have also impacted the
testing.
Glenn
________________________________
From: Daniel Keisling [mailto:daniel.keisling[at]austin.ppdi.com
<mailto:daniel.keisling[at]austin.ppdi.com> ]
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 12:37 PM
To: Glenn Walker; Bill Holland; toasters[at]mathworks.com
Subject: RE: De-dup'ing Primary Storage
Thanks for the stats, I'll be de-duping VMWare data soon too.
My NetApp storage tech says that read cache peformance will increase
since you're reducing the total number of actual blocks. I have not
heard of any performance degradations with A-SIS, other than filer
overhead (CPU) when SIS is actually de-duplicating. My A-SIS schedules
are during off-peak hours so it's not a concern of mine.
Daniel
________________________________
From: owner-toasters[at]mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters[at]mathworks.com
<mailto:owner-toasters[at]mathworks.com> ] On Behalf Of Glenn Walker
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:42 AM
To: Bill Holland; toasters[at]mathworks.com
Subject: RE: De-dup'ing Primary Storage
We've been doing some VMWare testing with FCP LUNs and A-SIS.
We saw a reduction from 471GB to 21GB with only about a 7% reduction in
performance. More than a fair trade-off in my opinion.
Our testing could have had impact on the performance more than the
de-dupe, however.
Glenn
________________________________
From: owner-toasters[at]mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters[at]mathworks.com
<mailto:owner-toasters[at]mathworks.com> ] On Behalf Of Bill Holland
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 6:50 AM
To: toasters[at]mathworks.com
Subject: De-dup'ing Primary Storage
To those of you that have implemented Nearstore and A-SIS on your
primary storage:
1. Have you seen any difference in overall filer performance?
2. If you have LUNs, how are your space savings on those volumes?
I know that enabling Nearstore does some system tweaking in the
background to increase the number of concurrent backup streams that can
be running, but I don't know what else it tweaks that may adversely
affect performance of a primary storage system. Afterall, it was
originally designed to run as a secondary storage platform.
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