Powerscale and VAAI ?

[pierluigi...@gmail.com]

Hello all,

  I have a collegue that want to use our powerscale as backend of a vmware  infrastructure, via NFS.

He wants, anyway, to have all vm disks to be thin, and asked  to search for VAAI. 

Despite all my research I can't find more than few old links about this, either on dell kb that on google researches, so I was wondering if it's me that I'm not able to do a search or is something that really is not possibile to achieve.

Can you help me share some light on subject ?

Thanks in advance.

Pierluigi

[Dan Pritts]

On 9 Sep 2023, at 2:30, pierluigi...@gmail.com wrote:

> Hello all,
> I have a collegue that want to use our powerscale as backend of a vmware
> infrastructure, via NFS.
> He wants, anyway, to have all vm disks to be thin, and asked to search for
> VAAI.

Hi - Sorry for the late response on this, cleaning out my mailbox.

Last I checked Dell no longer supports VAAI for powerscale.

They definitely do not recommend using powerscale as VM storage. Cynically, I think they have other products they’d like to sell for that use case.

We use it for our small VMware environment of about 60 VMs. For most VMs we just use thin provisioned disks and accept the fragmentation. For a few things with large bulk storage we use eager-zeroed thick vmdk’s; I think you have to create those from the command line with vmkfstools.

danno

[bob flynn]

would be of the camp that isilon is  v.poor fit for esx simply as block size sweet spot is for large reas/writes ?

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[Luc Simard]

That’s correct, plus VMDK can host applications that are very small block I/O intensive, this will create hot spots and inject latency or added locking/ dead locks, depending on node model and OneFS version . 

Application quiescing and consistency cannot be met if that’s a requirement , OneFS is unaware of what’s happening in the VM itself, it sees and manage only the VM files at the file system level.

This is lessened on 9.4 or better on 9.7, but still suboptimal for NAS, a block or direct attached like PowerStore /VxRail will serve you better at a better price point.

If you have smart pool license, you could try to isolate the files to SSD if you a small workload and very small capacity needs. 

Mind the capacity and queuing on SSD and avoid 100% at all cost on both.

See isi statistics drive —long or isi statistics system , you can track with a isi statistics  workflow once you have a pattern workflow defined.

Cheers.

/ls

Luc Simard
Personal Email:
- simard.J...@gmail.com
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Washington State, USA

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucsimard/

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 9, 2023, at 11:00, bob flynn <bobfl...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Sid Young]

He would be better off using an ME5 product and use DAS, much more robust for a VMWare environment.

Sid

[Dan Pritts]

I surely wouldn’t recommend powerscale when the target usage is for vsphere. However, in a smaller environment, having a small vsphere environment as part of the workload isn’t insane. Source: have been doing it for nine years.

It is not without its downsides, but managing yet another storage platform is also not without its downsides.

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