VM /ETC

This session is moderated by Ron Oglesby, Service Director – Virtualization for Glass House Technologies. This is a Datadomain session that I anticipate to be a about the design and implementation issues faced by various Datadomain customers. No internet connection in this room so this will be a delayed post.

Like all the other sessions, the disclaimer slide is shown. I’ve learned from the last session not every session is going to have “forward looking” statements. Ron even commented that the slide was put in all the VMworld 2008 presentations by the VMware legal team.

Ron begins by discussing storage being the number one cost in a virtualization implementation. Snapshots, backups, and VM replication and cloning result in the need for large amounts of storage. Complicate this with the need for faster recovery, management automation, and increasing retention and compliance requirements help skyrocket the storage design footprint. Storage is implemented for virtualization too often as an afterthought.

Ron explains the session is about options for storing and replicating snapshots of VMs and the storage ramifications of server consolidation. The session will also illustrate how deduplication and virtualization complement each other.

The rest of the session was customer testimonials. The following are various comments from the customers that caught my attention.

• Datadomain demo box was installed and receiving data within 15 minutes. Very quick to install and configure.
• Able to get rid of about a rack and half of backup equipment and replace it with a 3U Datadomain box
• A 5TB Datadomain box is more expensive than 5TB of disk storage. In reality it equates to 5X the amount of storage.
• Using vRanger and Backup Exec as the backup products and Datadomain as the target.
• A 5TB Datadomain device is actually storing 50TB of data at the primary location and close to 100TB at the secondary location.
• Data is deduplicated inline and before it ever hits the disk.
• The Datadomain filer is a target on the network. It is seen as a NAS or can be used with fiber channel.
• If using vRanger do not compress the backup for quicker restores. Turning off compression also increases the de-dupe ratio.
• After the Backup Exec job completed, replication to the DR site Datadomain filer was complete within 15 minutes.
• Experimenting with running live VMs on the Datadomain NFS share at the DR site
• 185 VMs are being replicated on a DS3 connection with about 15% utilization of that pipe. Only de-dupe deltas are replicated.
• You can triple the capacity of the 5TB Datadomain device by adding up to 3 additional disk shelves.
• Sizing the disk space needed for the Datadomain device must take into account the retention period of the data along with the size of data in use.

It was interesting to me to hear about running live VMs on the Datadomain NFS share. I was under the impression this was not supported and even if it was, it was not a good idea. A Datadomain filer was better used as a target for static files such as backups. The session today showed that some customers are running VMs on NFS from a Datadomain device at least in the DR site.

Related Posts

• Backup VMs to CIFS and NFS Datastores with vRanger Pro and Datadomain (0)
• Designing the Next Generation Data Center #KN EMC (1)
• Linux Strategy and Roadmap #TA3201 (9)
• Joint VMware and NetApp Best Practices for Running VI3 on IP Based Storage #TA2784 (7)
• Use VMware Converter to Solve ESX Snapshot Issues (5)
• Simply Automating Virtual Machine IP Addressing For Disaster Recovery Sites (without scripting) (13)
• Help Evaluating VMware Virtual Machine Backup Options (5)
• Real Thin Provisioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin (28)
• Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning (13)
• Tap into vSphere PVSCSI Performance with Separate VM Boot and Data Drives (11)