Paper: Microsoft Hyper-V scalability with EMC Symmetrix VMAX
 |
EMC has released a white paper titled: Microsoft Hyper-V scalability with EMC Symmetrix VMAX, the paper which contains 17 pages highlights a Hyper-V scalability test performed by EMC during the creation of one of the largest Hyper-V environments in the world.
The environment consists of a 16-node Hyper-V cluster, using the Symmetrix VMAX storage arrays capable of scaling to 64 virtual machines per cluster node for a total of 1024 virtual machines, the goal was to see how well the Symmetrix VMAX storage array performs and how performance can be optimized.
For deployment of the VMs initially System Center Virtual Machine Manager was used, where templates were used in combination with Windows Powershell to create the VMs, but because SCVMM uses the network to deploy VMs using this method would take days. Therefore it was decided to use the TimeFinder local storage replication feature which was capable of duplicating a fully populated data LUN containing 64 VMs, 15 times.
The performance results were measured by starting every 30 minutes in parallel virtual machines on a group of four parent nodes.
By using graphs it is shown that as the I/O from virtual machines is increased, the array activity increased to accommodate the requests. IOPS reached nearly 40,000 after 5 minutes and by the end of the test the disks reached over 85% busy.
Optimizing performance can be achieved by:
- Utilizing multiple HBA’s, so that saturation of I/O paths is prevented
- Utilizing multiple front-end controllers, preventing hitting a queue full situation causing a I/O bottleneck on the host server
- Using EMC’s multipath software PowerPath which optimizes load balancing
- Quick formatting NTFS volumes for thin space saving, using disk space on an as-needed basis.
- Avoiding dynamic VHDs for heavy workloads, as a fixed VHD performs 10 to 15 percent better than a dynamic VHD.
- Using appropriate drive counts when using Virtual Provisioning, and spreading data devices in a thin poll to keep up with the aggregated I/O requirements.
- Watch the accumulated I/O load for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs), I/O can come from any number of parent nodes in a cluster in parallel.
- Sizing snap pools with sufficient drives for change rate and workload, supporting the copy on first write activity coming from source devices, by spreading the save devices across a sufficient number of drives.
- Using metadevices with larger number of smaller hypers, which are better than metadevices with a low number of large hypers.
The paper further discusses an even larger environment, where 7 times a 16 node cluster providing 7168 VMs is attached to a scaled-out VMAX storage solution.
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware announced the acquisition of Wanova Inc. a company whose main product is called Mirage.
Mirage is a centralized management and recovery solution for physical desktop images over the…
May 23rd, 2012
Yesterday VMware published a paper focused on VMware vMSC (vSphere Metro Storage Cluster), a new configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List intended for environments where disaster/downtime avoidance is a…
May 22nd, 2012
Yesterday, during its annual conference in Las Vegas, EMC announced the acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud-storage privately held startup founded in 2008 and based in Menlo Park, California.
Terms…
May 21st, 2012
On May 18th Oracle announced the general availability of version 3.1 of its x86 enterprise virtualization solution VM Server.
This release follows 3.0 announced on August 24th 2011.
All the new…
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
May 14th, 2012
Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.
VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza…
May 10th, 2012
On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for…
May 9th, 2012
On April 26 VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.1, previously introduced as a part of vCenter Operations Management Suite.
VIN automatically detects, discovers and…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress