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Methanar
Sep 26, 2013

by the sex ghost
THREADS BACK

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Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
Wooooo

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


What fixed it?

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



Enough posts to make it tick passed the cursed page.

Edit:

Methanar posted:

im gay but thankfully nobody will ever read this

Think again rear end in a top hat!

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

It verks!!

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

We have a Dell MD3200 DAS. It's been out of warranty and it's only 6TB RAW (10x600GB 15K SAS)

I'd like to buy a PowerVault MD3400, with something like 2x1.92TB SSD and then 10x4TB spinners

How do you get all the data from one of those, to the other? We have 2 VMware servers connected to our current one.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bob Morales posted:

We have a Dell MD3200 DAS. It's been out of warranty and it's only 6TB RAW (10x600GB 15K SAS)

I'd like to buy a PowerVault MD3400, with something like 2x1.92TB SSD and then 10x4TB spinners

How do you get all the data from one of those, to the other? We have 2 VMware servers connected to our current one.

Is the first one being used as a datastore within VMware? If so, just SvMotion the VMs from one to the other (or power off/migrate if you are running free/essentials).

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

There's a Dell R610 and Dell R430 (?) connected to the existing MD3200 via mini-SAS cables. Both servers have 1 connection to each of the two controllers in the MD3200.

Here's the back of the servers:



And the back of the MD3200



Can I just connect the new MD3400 to the servers (instead of the second controller in the MD3200), and then just copy the datastores over?

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


That's not technically a DAS - it's a SAN that connects via SAS. With a DAS you'd see all the disks presented to a PERC in the server and then build your logical volumes from that, whereas I assume you can access a management interface through some horrible Java applet and export volumes from the SAN, and then the HBA just sees these logical volumes.

You probably can connect the new MD3400 to the second port on your servers, assuming there's no configuration in there for multipathing already.

Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Mar 21, 2018

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Thanks Ants posted:

That's not technically a DAS - it's a SAN that connects via SAS. With a DAS you'd see all the disks presented to a PERC in the server and then build your logical volumes from that, whereas I assume you can access a management interface through some horrible Java applet and export volumes from the SAN, and then the HBA just sees these logical volumes.

You probably can connect the new MD3400 to the second port on your servers, assuming there's no configuration in there for multipathing already. You may be able to get away with plugging it into the SAS Out connector on your MD3200 if you didn't want to lose the redundancy of having two links per host to the storage.

I thought DAS meant directly attached storage, as in it's directly connected using SAS. Is that just a Dell term or something?

Yea, I was also wondering if I could connect the MD3200 and MD3400 together and copy everything over using the management interface/Dell program. The goal is to retire the MD3200 when it's all said and done.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


I took that bit out because it looks like you can't just plug them together like that.

DAS is usually a shelf of disks presented to a controller inside one server, this is shared storage that happens to be connected via SAS to avoid the switch costs and configuration involved with iSCSI. It's not a bad idea but obviously you can't have more hosts than you have SAS ports.

devmd01
Mar 7, 2006

Elektronik
Supersonik
You’ll need to break redundancy, move one set of cables to the new SAN, sVmotion to the new datastores, and re-establish multipathing once everything is migrated. Hope you can find some easy maintenance windows!

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

devmd01 posted:

You’ll need to break redundancy, move one set of cables to the new SAN, sVmotion to the new datastores, and re-establish multipathing once everything is migrated. Hope you can find some easy maintenance windows!

It should cause no downtime, but probably a good idea to do it during a window anyway.

kiwid
Sep 30, 2013

I have a question. A friend told me that I need to be unmapping or doing something in VMware to free up storage on our SAN. I'm not really sure what he's talking about. We have a Nimble CS300. Do I need to be doing any maintenance tasks on this thing like mentioned?

edit: some more info: The CS300 is just one array with two volumes/datastores. Using iSCSI and both datastores are formatted with VMFS using the entire space. A very straight forward simple setup.

kiwid fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Mar 27, 2018

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





iSCSI unmapping. Whether you need to do anything or not depends on your environment.

kiwid
Sep 30, 2013

How do I know if I have to do that?

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

kiwid posted:

How do I know if I have to do that?

What version of ESXi are you running?

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Also are the LUNs that your datastore sit on thin provisioned? If not, then you don't need to worry about this.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Also worth checking you're using VAAI if you're doing general storage maintenance

kiwid
Sep 30, 2013

YOLOsubmarine posted:

What version of ESXi are you running?

6.0 U2

Internet Explorer posted:

Also are the LUNs that your datastore sit on thin provisioned? If not, then you don't need to worry about this.

Yes

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

kiwid posted:

6.0 U2


Yes

Then you’ll need to run the scsi unmap command manually to reclaim thin provisioned blocks on the datastore.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2057513.

Starting in 6.5 it’s automated (again).

Thanks Ants posted:

Also worth checking you're using VAAI if you're doing general storage maintenance

It’s enabled by default, so I’d presume so.

kiwid
Sep 30, 2013

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Then you’ll need to run the scsi unmap command manually to reclaim thin provisioned blocks on the datastore.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2057513.

Starting in 6.5 it’s automated (again).


Well we have a planned upgrade soon. If I upgrade it'll just start automating it then and I don't have to worry about this?

edit: nvm, found this:

quote:

However, due to the changes done in VMFS 6 metadata structures to make it 4K aligned, you cannot inline/offline upgrade from VMFS5 to VMFS6.

kiwid fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Mar 28, 2018

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
Just create a new datastore and SvMotion or power down and migrate.

Spring Heeled Jack
Feb 25, 2007

If you can read this you can read
So my company is probably going to venture into the realm of all-flash arrays soon.

Our current setup is an IBM v7000 with 17TB usable space among a couple data stores with 10&15k disks.

I know a lot of the all flash arrays rely on dedupe and compression, but how reliable are their numbers in this regard? I’m getting quoted flash setups with anywhere from 10-20TB usable and then they’ll say 28-48TB ‘effective’ space.

I feel like a doofus potentially buying a new SAN with less physical disk space than our current one, though I know it really isn’t the case. Help calm my nerves?

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


We reliably get 3:1 on our Pure on average. Some datasets are closer to 2.4:1, some are 5:1 or more.

So those quoted numbers seem about right.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Spring Heeled Jack posted:

So my company is probably going to venture into the realm of all-flash arrays soon.

Our current setup is an IBM v7000 with 17TB usable space among a couple data stores with 10&15k disks.

I know a lot of the all flash arrays rely on dedupe and compression, but how reliable are their numbers in this regard? I’m getting quoted flash setups with anywhere from 10-20TB usable and then they’ll say 28-48TB ‘effective’ space.

I feel like a doofus potentially buying a new SAN with less physical disk space than our current one, though I know it really isn’t the case. Help calm my nerves?

You’re gonna need to list some specific vendors and tell us what kind of data you’ve got. I’ve seen everything from 6:1 to 1.3:1 ratios. It can vary significantly. To size this stuff the vendors or VARs should at minimum be providing a data reduction rate based on your specific data accounting. Some vendors will back this up with a guarantee (Pure and NetApp at least) that if you don’t at least match their stated data reduction ratio then they will give you more drives.

Just buy Pure though. It’s the most likely to give you the best ratios and it’ll be one of the easiest to work with.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


I see vsan get 2-3 in a mixed nix/win environment.

Pure is loving fantastic if your budget can do it.

S2D is working pretty drat well for a customer too. I may or may not like building my own storage infra though.

Spring Heeled Jack
Feb 25, 2007

If you can read this you can read

YOLOsubmarine posted:

You’re gonna need to list some specific vendors and tell us what kind of data you’ve got. I’ve seen everything from 6:1 to 1.3:1 ratios. It can vary significantly. To size this stuff the vendors or VARs should at minimum be providing a data reduction rate based on your specific data accounting. Some vendors will back this up with a guarantee (Pure and NetApp at least) that if you don’t at least match their stated data reduction ratio then they will give you more drives.

Just buy Pure though. It’s the most likely to give you the best ratios and it’ll be one of the easiest to work with.

We’re getting quotes from Tegile, Pure, Nimble, and both Compellent and Unity from Dell. So pretty much all of the big players, still waiting on final quotes from all of them aside from Tegile, who quoted us the T4700 with (I think) about 20TB raw disk. I’ll have to check the quotes tomorrow.

This is a strictly VMware env with mostly smaller windows servers, and a big (5TB) mssql DB that we are planning to move from a failover cluster to an AG, doubling the needed space on our SAN. We’re pretty much at capacity on our v7000.

Spring Heeled Jack fucked around with this message at 03:15 on May 22, 2018

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Pure and Nimble are the winners for an esxi environment there, all things being equal.

Spring Heeled Jack
Feb 25, 2007

If you can read this you can read

Potato Salad posted:

Pure and Nimble are the winners for an esxi environment there, all things being equal.

That seems to be the overall feeling I’m getting! I’ve heard Pure can be pricy but I’ve yet to see numbers from either yet (thanks CDW)!

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Spring Heeled Jack posted:

We’re getting quotes from Tegile, Pure, Nimble, and both Compellent and Unity from Dell. So pretty much all of the big players, still waiting on final quotes from all of them aside from Tegile, who quoted us the T4700 with (I think) about 20TB raw disk. I’ll have to check the quotes tomorrow.

This is a strictly VMware env with mostly smaller windows servers, and a big (5TB) mssql DB that we are planning to move from a failover cluster to an AG, doubling the needed space on our SAN. We’re pretty much at capacity on our v7000.

Of those Pure and Nimble are the only ones I’d consider. Tegile’s data reduction is strictly worse than Pure’s (requires setting block size to 32k which is much larger than Pure’s dedupe chunk size of 512b, no global dedupe across a/b pools, incredibly memory hungry), Compellant is still built on a pointless tiering architecture, and Unity is just VNX with SSDs.

Nimble is good, but their dedupe is a little funky and it’s now an HP storage product, which means it will slowly wither on the vine.

I’d guess you’ll probably let see at least 3:1 on that data. Database data doesn’t reduce as well, but server OS does. Pretty similar footprint to on of our new Pure customers and they’re seeing right at 3:1. Also worth noting that your two DAG copies will deduplicate against each other resulting in significantly less than double the utilization.

Zorak of Michigan
Jun 10, 2006

I've been super happy with our Pure arrays. Our data reduction ratios are pretty good (though they're thrown off weird poo poo like huge swap partitions created to provide DISM backing store for Solaris nodes running Oracle 11, which are guaranteed never to see a byte of use) and more importantly, support has been great.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Of those Pure and Nimble are the only ones I’d consider. Tegile’s data reduction is strictly worse than Pure’s (requires setting block size to 32k which is much larger than Pure’s dedupe chunk size of 512b, no global dedupe across a/b pools, incredibly memory hungry).

How does pure manage to not be memory hungry when it's a tiny block size?

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

H110Hawk posted:

How does pure manage to not be memory hungry when it's a tiny block size?

Pure actually does some memory management. Tegile (I *think* this has changed very new versions of the code) never pruned the fingerprint database, so it would just grow and grow and grow unless you ran an undocumented command to clean it. On hybrid systems this was catastrophically bad since it would overflow to the SSD tier which would in turn push cached data out and suddenly everything would get 10-1000 times slower.

Their all flash stuff is better simply because memory exhaustion is less catastrophic when gets pushed off to flash instead of spinning media. But in general their grasp of the technology they borrowed to make their arrays doesn’t seem all that solid. ZFS dedupe was not built to be lightweight, and Tegile didn’t do anything to change that.

Just anecdotally my experience with Pure vs Tegile across my customer base is that the Pure stuff works as advertised and the Tegile stuff often does not.

Also, my original statement was incomplete. Pure can check disk segments at 512B offset for pattern matching and dedupe, but still operates on the blocks from 4K and up for dedupe.

YOLOsubmarine fucked around with this message at 04:27 on May 22, 2018

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Of those Pure and Nimble are the only ones I’d consider

Nimble is good, but their dedupe is a little funky and it’s now an HP storage product, which means it will slowly wither on the vine.
This is a 100% good take

kzersatz
Oct 13, 2012

How's it the kiss of death, if I have no lips?
College Slice
I've got 12 PURE arrays in production.

I can validate a good amount of dedup results if you want, we get some VERY aggressive deduplication numbers across the board, but we have almost dedicated arrays for specific purposes, so.

Note: I don't have a NIMBLE with deduplication, but I do have three Nimbles in the works atm.

kzersatz
Oct 13, 2012

How's it the kiss of death, if I have no lips?
College Slice

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Just anecdotally my experience with Pure vs Tegile across my customer base is that the Pure stuff works as advertised and the Tegile stuff often does not.

Also, my original statement was incomplete. Pure can check disk segments at 512B offset for pattern matching and dedupe, but still operates on the blocks from 4K and up for dedupe.

I agree with you/all of this, PURE makes a very good point of being "matter of fact" and point blank about their offerings, more often than not, if you're on the fence, get a guarantee in writing and they'll honor it to a fault.
When we POC'd our first two M20's, we were promised one of them could fit our entire Virtual environment without choking (1,000+ VM's, very mixed workload), with 8.0:1+ deduplication with the guarantee that if they didn't meet it, they'd ship another disk pack to make up for it, for free.

TL;DR
Pure's good stuff, I'm a fan.

Spring Heeled Jack
Feb 25, 2007

If you can read this you can read
I'm leaning towards Pure, I need to get a proper demo scheduled with them. I know there's probably a ton of dedupe savings waiting to be had on our 17TB array, as most of it is smaller IIS webservers and other things.

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


One of the crazier ratios I saw with our pure was a 2tb file server we had. It was mixed content, images, docs, zip files, PDFs. For a brief time I had it on the same volume as its redundant partner. So, two 2tb vmdk files, both 90% full, but the same data on each.

Actual volume size on storage was about 210gb.

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YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Pure just announced new hardware at Accelerate as well, so if you buy now you’ll get an NVMe ready X array instead of the older Ms.

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