Storage is an essential component of vSphere design and provides the foundation for the vSphere environment. A solid storage design that addresses capacity, performance, availability, and recoverability is the key to a successful vSphere design. The following diagram displays how a storage design is integrated into the design process:
Several storage options and protocols are supported in the vSphere environment. The architecture that's chosen for a vSphere deployment depends on the capabilities and features needed to meet the design requirements.
This chapter will cover calculating the storage capacity and performance requirements, sizing datastores, and selecting a storage protocol. The calculations for the recipes in this chapter will be based on the following requirements that were identified in Chapter 3, The Design Factors:
- There are 100 application servers.
- Each application server is configured with 100 GB of disk space. The peak disk capacity usage of a single application server is approximately 65 percent of the total or 65 GB. The average disk performance of a single application server is 65 IOPS with an IO profile of 90 percent read and 10 percent write.
- Provide capacity to support growth for 25 additional application servers over the next 5 years.
Several new storage features are available with the release of vSphere 6.7. These new storage features include improvements to Virtual SAN (VSAN) and Virtual Volumes (VVOL), and support for Persistent Memory (PMEM) and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). This chapter will also provide an overview of these new storage options so that they can be incorporated into a vSphere 6 design.
In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- Identifying RAID levels
- Calculating storage capacity requirements
- Determining storage performance requirements
- Calculating storage throughput
- Storage connectivity options
- Storage path selection plugins
- Sizing datastores
- Designing VSAN for virtual machine storage
- Designing Virtual Volumes (VVOL) for virtual machine storage
- Incorporating storage policies into a design
- NFS v4.1 capabilities and limits
- Using persistent memory to maximize VM performance