3PAR OS 3.2.2 What’s New

At the end of last week 3PAR OS 3.2.2 was released.  It contained a significant number of enhancements and new features, here are the highlights:

  • Support for the new 8000 and 20,000 models
  • The Persistent Check Sum feature announced at HP Discover becomes available
  • Remote copy is enhanced with the availability of the asynchronous streaming mode also announced at HP Discover
  • File persona enhancements – Useable space doubled to 128TB, thin dedupe available and AV protection added
  • Peer motion now allows Storage Federation
  • HDS added to list of systems Online Import can be used with
  • Raid 0 AFC layout as default
  • Greater scalability, including support for multiple VVOL containers
  • Greater control over AO.  For each CPG you can define a minimum and maximum space utilisation. Definitely interested to try out this new feature

You can see a summary of the new features in the last few major 3PAR releases below.  This graphic was originally featured in the official HP storage blog and you can read the full post here

OS versions

 

You can read about the full set of features in the 3PAR OS 3.2.2 release notes.

 

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VVOLs Snakes and Ladders

snakes and ladders

 

VVOLs have been available for a few months now. I’m not going to cover the basics in this post but if you are new to VVOLs check out my over view of VVOLs. Based on a wholly unscientific survey on Twitter I asked how many people had adopted VVOLs and the response was limited. From what I have seen on blogs, I have seen plenty written on the technology but little about people actually implementing it. I wanted to look today at what’s hot about VVOLs (Ladders) and what could potentially be holding people back (Snakes). Finally we will look at a balanced way of moving forwards.

 

Ladders

ladders

Granularity

This Ladder’s section covers what’s hot about VVOLs. One of the most obvious is per VM and indeed per disk management since a separate VVOL is created for each part of the files that make up a VM. This means the broad approach that had to be used with LUN’s containing vast numbers of VMs could be a thing of the past. The Granularity of VVOLs allows performance changes to be dynamically applied to a single VM, rather than having to apply to all the VM’s on a traditional LUN. Additionally protection of VM’s is also simpler as individual snapshots can be applied at the VM level utilising the storage system to perform the operation.

 

Policies

This leads directly onto the next benefit, policy driven storage. Because each VM is constructed in such a granular manner it allows different storage requirements to be applied easily on a per VM basis. This is enabled through VM policies which enable specific requirements to be defined and allows a more focused app centric approach. The capabilities of the storage array are fed back via the VASA provider and then can be served up in policies of your choosing. You could keep it simple having a gold, silver and bronze policy or define other attributes such as the VM must have snapshot or replication features available.

 

As storage is now policy driven storage provisioning can now be done automatically as part of the VM creation process in vSphere. Previously the storage admin would have to get all the storage lined up before the VM admin even thought about creating a VM. Now everything is done on the fly, assuming your storage admin has completed the one time step of enabling the system for VVOLs. The VM can be created and the necessary VVOLS are automatically created on the storage. Essentially the process of provisioning a VM has less admin overhead and is much faster.

 

Performance

VVOLs allow the storage system to be able to do what it does best, so storage operations such as cloning or taking snapshots can be offloaded to the storage system delivering a performance boost. Also VVOLs remove the previous limitation of 256 LUN’s per host.

 

Snakes

snake1

No really after you

English people love to queue, and with VVOLs it seem to be a case of “no really after you”. Most organisations virtual environments are running business critical systems and there could be some fear moving onto what is effectively a 1.0 product release.

Availability

A handful of systems including 3PAR were VVOL ready at launch but other systems such as EMC’s VNX will not be ready till quarter 2 2016 and XtermeIO till quarter 4 2016.

 

Not all vendors are equal

No specific features were part of the certification process. So the availability of features such as snapshots, clones, thin provisioning etc. are vendor specific. So check you’re getting what you want from your implementation.

 

Politics

Whilst VVOLs are a new technology, one of the keys to success with any new technology is putting in the correct people and processes around it. Firstly and perhaps most obviously VVOLs are a new technology and so there will be no readymade experts out there.

VVOLs also provide a new way of working, effectively excluding the storage guy from the process of provisioning storage for VM’s. This could create potential internal political conflict with the storage resource feeling like they are losing control and visibility of what’s going on.

I’ll take it all please

When people started with virtualisation they acted like a kid in a candy shop requesting crazy amounts of RAM because it was there. I can see this being the same with people requesting that their VM is cut from the highest performance policy and in turn expensive backend storage.

images0HN6KQSX

Compatibility

Not only will you need to be running vSphere 6 and hence all your equipment will need to be supported to version 6. But also you will need to check other components such as HBA’s in servers are compatible. Not all features are supported, for example (FT) and Microsoft Failover Clustering (MSCS) for example are not supported.

 

Moving forwards

No one knows yet if VVOLs will completely replace VMFS. But how many vendors would want to maintain the code and support for 2 products delivering such similar use cases. I am not suggesting that VMFS is about to disappear any time soon but it would seem sensible that at some time VVOLs will become the successor to VMFS.  So how do we move forward to start to use and familiarise ourselves with VVOLs:

Support

If your storage vendor doesn’t support VVOLs, yet there obviously isn’t much you can do just hang in there or switch vendors. If your vendor does support it, the next step is to start looking at compatibility with the rest of your infrastructure and required features

Compatibility

Don’t just assume things are going to work together and will be available in this initial release. You can use the vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVols) Interoperability Matrix to check which features are compatible with VVOLs.  Check for any vendor specific requirements including  your full SAN infrastructure such as HBA’s. Also don’t forget good ol’ testing covered in the next section.

Lab time

Remember the brave old days of virtualisation when you strode boldly around the office clutching VMware capacity planner reports shouting “it’s all going to be virtual I tell you.” Today the brave attitude has been replaced by caution with the reality that a lot of critical systems sit on top of virtual infrastructures. If you’re not ready to put VVOLs into your commercial test environment yet check out this guide by Luca Dell’Oca describing how you can use a simulator from EMC to test VVOLs in your home lab.

Start simple

Again thinking back to the early days of virtualisation the sensible and often- taken approach when moving to a virtualised environment was a phased one. With the initial phases being to virtualise test /dev, then IT system, business apps and critical apps. This again seems like a sensible path for migration to VVOLs. VVOLs and VMFS can co-exist on the same storage system. So why not start small and get 1 or 2 test systems using VVOLs.

As things progress and confidence grows it is even possible to migrate a VM from a VMFS volume to a VVOL.

Do your planning

As outlined above do not under-estimate how different working with VVOLs will be, you need to make sure you have clearly thought through how this will change your processes. Make sure everyone in the IT department is on-board and understand their new responsibilities, plus consider questions like how will capacity be managed and monitored when it’s the VM admin doing the provisioning. How does this affect change control? On what basis will the required storage policy be decided? This and other questions relevant to your business, need planning to get the maximum return from this new technology and to ensure you are not held back by processes or politics.

 

So what are you waiting for? Get stuck in there with VVOLs. Check out my post on how VVOLs might change how you work with 3Par and my over view of VVOLs posts as well.

 

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