VMware vSA presentation at Dell TechCenter User Group IO (DTCUG-IO) Event at VMworld 2011

1. VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA):Tech Talk and Discussion Todd Muirhead, Staff Engineer, Performance Team

2. Tech Talk on VSA - Intro Who am I? Todd Muirhead – VMware, Staff Engineer, Outbound Performance Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SAP, VSA, Whitepapers VMware VROOM! blog @virtualTodd I was one of the @DellServerGeeks originally Original member of DellTechCenter Presented Super Session at Vmworld 2007 with Kong – Virtualizing Exchange Co-Creator and Maintainer of open source DVD Store benchmark

4. Easy to use

7. Get more out of your hardware Revolutionary software that delivers shared storage capabilities without the cost and complexity 3

8. vSphere Storage Appliance – How does it work? VSA runs as a virtual machine on vSphere, in multiple hosts 1 VMware vSphere Storage Appliance provides virtual shared storage volumes without the hardware. Enabling key features: High Availability vMotion Fault Tolerance Distributed Resource Scheduler Storage vMotion 2 Uses server internal hard disk – no additional hardware required Clusters storage across server nodes 3

12. VSA Technical Overview VSA is a cluster of 2 or 3 hosts that use local storage to create a “virtual SAN” Simple Install / Simple Management Everything done with a handful of clicks Replication of data in VSA cluster is setup automatically and runs all the time Each Host has an NFS export , managed as normal in vCenter Hardware Local Storage can be internal SATA or SAS 4 x Gigabit Ethernet per host is used by VSA RAID 1/0 at Hardware level for data protection Hardware Compatibility List Combination of RAID 1/0 and replication Very good high availability Useable Capacity is ¼ of raw capacity

13. VSA Manager vCenter Plug-In

14. VSA NFS Datastores VSA NFS Datastores Appears just like any other NFS datastore Can be used as NFS datastore to host VMs

15. Key Factors for VSA Performance Storage Performance Key Factors – The Usual Suspects Number of Disks Speed of Disks SATA, SAS, 10K RPM, 15K RPM RAID Type Read / Write Ratio VSA Specific Factors Replicated Data on second host All writes must be written on secondary host Each write generated by VM, will result in 2 writes logically and 4 writes physically RAID Controller Cache size of local SCSI controller

16. VSA Storage Performance Test: Results(2/3) 2 All 3 VM 1 VM 2 VM 3 2 VMs

17. VSA Storage Performance Test: Results (3/3) 2 VM 3 2 VMs VM 1 All 3 VM 2 Total Much Higher All 3 Hosts Active Primary Replica