A match made in heaven?

Who am I?Richard BarlowSystems Architect and Engineering Manager

for the Virginia Credit UnionWorked in IT for almost 20 yearsWorked with VMware since 2.0.1

About Virginia Credit Union1.8 Billion dollars net worthNearly 200,000 members worldwide13 branches, soon to be 15To be our members’ trusted provider of

financial services, helping them achieve greater success.

The VACU environmentPresently running 200+ virtual machines in

VMware across 18 nodes80% virtualizedHP Proliant DL series serversHP Proliant blade systems with Virtual

ConnectNetApp 6070 cluster for core storageNetApp 3020 cluster for DRCisco networking infrastructure (6509 core

ethernet, 9506 core fibre channel)

Why NFS?SimpleInexpensiveIncredibly flexible with the right storageHigh performance

LUNs have a single queue per volume, NFS is per object

Superior locking technologyHigher speed networks – 10GigE is here, 100

and 1,000 are on the horizonJumbo frame support

Why NFS continuedLeverages the best of both VMware and

intelligent storageVMware does one thing extremely well – run

VMs with low overhead and high speedIntelligent storage with NFS allows your arrays

to do what they are best at – managing your storage

You can create much larger volumes (1TB+) without penalty

A note on the demosSome screenshots from my production and

dev environmentsSome live demos with VMware Workstation

6.0.2The demos are NetApp centric because that

what I useOther storage vendors may offer comparable

features

Live demo configuration

Areas of focusDeduplicationBackup and recoveryVolume cloningThis is just the tip of the iceberg . . . I only

have 25 minutes

DeduplicationDeduplication removes duplicate blocks in a

storage systemDoing on disk what VMware does in RAM

This can be done with Fiber Channel, but the result is less than impressiveSince FC is block oriented, you will not see a

change in available space from the point of view of the ESX server

With NFS it is magicYou can literally watch your free space increase

Deduplication - continued

Deduplication – continued 2

Deduplication – continued 3

Deduplication – continued 4

Deduplication – concludedWith deduplication you can achieve the

ultimate in efficient storage utilizationCombined with thin provisioning, wasted

space is a thing of the past

Backup and recoveryHow do we traditionally backup and recover

VMware?Consolidated BackupNDMPLocal installed backup clients (ugh)Don’t backup and pray to the deity of your

choosing nightly.

Or . . . You can use snapshot technology

Snapshots for data recoverySnapshots can be used on both LUNs and

NFS volumes, but once again NFS is far more useful.

Why?With NFS, you can get single VM or even

single file recovery without third party software

LUNs are limited to entire volume restore / copies – this can be VERY SLOW with large objects

Demo – Snapshot recoveryScenario – Someone on your team has

deleted the .VMDK file to a critical server accidentally.How would you recover?

Let’s try a snapshot recovery

Snapshot recovery overviewIt was pretty much instantNo backup devices (tape) requiredMinimum downtimeWe do it and it works!

Single file snapshot recoveryYou can also recover single files via a

snapshot!Use a Linux loopback mount with the correct

offsetDo we have time for a demo?

DR RecoveryMost storage systems also allow some sort of

replicationWhy bother with tape? Can you achieve your RTO?

Storage based snapshot replication via NFS is the quickest and simplest way to recover for DR

No expensive fiber channel needed in a warm DR site

No complex provisioning of fiber – anyone can do the volume mounts with minimal instruction or script

We have a RPO/RTO of one hour and we achieve it via NFS + storage replication

Volume CloningHave you ever fallen into resignature /

snapshot hell?It doesn’t exist with NFS

You can clone volumes at will on the storage side and ESX just mounts them with no fuss

Volume Cloning demoScenario – You need a bunch of VDI clients

for a special projectDisk space is at a premiumYou don’t want to spend more time than

necessary

You have created a volume with a number of sysprepped XP VMs

Volume Cloning in productionWe had the challenge to create over 100 VDI

clients for an internal application testWe created a volume with 20 sysprepped XP

VMs using VMware cloningWe then FlexCloned this volume 5 timesAfter all was said and done, we had over 100

VMs in less than 55GB of disk spaceNo noticeable performance degradation

ConclusionNFS will change the way that you think about

VMwareYou can leverage the power of intelligent

storage“Once you use NFS, you will never want to

plug in another piece of fiber channel again”