vSphere 5.1 introduced a number of vCloud Director (vCD) interoperability features from a storage perspective, namely ability to take VM snapshots from within the vCD UI, interoperability with Storage Profiles and interoperability with Storage DRS. Admittedly, its been a while since I played with vCD and I am a little rusty, but I wanted to see how well these storage features worked with vCD 5.1. I’ll follow-up with some future posts on how this all integrates, but this first post is just to highlight an issue I ran into in my haste to get the environment up and running. The…
A quick kudos to my colleague William Lam (@lamw) for bringing this to my attention. There is an issue in the new vSphere 5.1 web client when it comes to displaying Fibre Channel World Wide Node Names (WWNN) and World Wide Port Names (WWPN). The WWNN & WWPN are unique identifiers used in the Fibre Channel world. The problem is that the WWPN & WWNN are not rendered correctly in the UI. It is easier to show you an example. Here is a screen shot taken from my own 5.1 environment. Note the WWNN & WWPN – the identifier displayed…
This is not really a storage feature per-se, but I am including it in this series of vSphere 5.1 storage enhancements simply because most of the work to support this 5 node Microsoft cluster framework was done in the storage layer.
This post will look at Storage DRS enhancements in vSphere 5.1.
In this post, I want to call out two important matters related to the vSphere 5.1 release & EMC storage. The first is related to Round Robin Path Policy changes, and the second relates to a VMFS5 volume creation issue.
Storage I/O Control (SIOC) was initially introduced in vSphere 4.1 to provide I/O prioritization of virtual machines running on a cluster of ESXi hosts that had access to shared storage. It extended the familiar constructs of shares and limits, which existed for CPU and memory, to address storage utilization through a dynamic allocation of I/O queue slots across a cluster of ESXi servers. The purpose of SIOC is to address the ‘noisy neighbour’ problem, i.e. a low priority virtual machine impacting other higher priority virtual machines due to the nature of the application and its I/O running in that low…
Let’s begin this post with a recap of the Storage vMotion enhancements made in vSphere 5.0. Storage vMotion in vSphere 5.0 enabled the migration of virtual machines with snapshots and also the migration of linked clones. It also introduced a new mirroring architecture which mirrors the changed disk blocks after they have been copied to the destination, i.e. we fork a write to both source and destination using mirror mode. This means migrations can be done in a single copy operation. Mirroring I/O between the source and the destination disks has significant gains when compared to the iterative disk pre-copy…