White Papers

Table of contents
1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 2
1.1 Audience ..................................................................................................................................................... 2
1.2 Terms ........................................................................................................................................................... 2
2 Overview of Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Unified Storage solution ................................................................ 4
2.1 EqualLogic FS7500 in virtualized environment .................................................................................... 4
2.2 Architecture and Setup ............................................................................................................................. 4
3 NFS network and host configuration .............................................................................................................. 7
3.1 Test configuration ...................................................................................................................................... 7
3.2 Test workloads ........................................................................................................................................... 9
3.3 NFS network load balancing and redundancy ..................................................................................... 9
3.4 NAS volumes and ESX datastores ......................................................................................................... 16
3.4.1 Number of datastores ..................................................................................................................... 16
3.4.2 Number of host NICs connected ................................................................................................. 18
3.4.3 NAS service IP addresses used to connect to the datastore ................................................... 19
3.4.4 Number of ESXi hosts ..................................................................................................................... 22
3.4.5 VMware specific recommendations ............................................................................................ 24
3.5 Virtual infrastructure operations ........................................................................................................... 25
4 Scalability of FS7500 ....................................................................................................................................... 27
4.1 Test workload........................................................................................................................................... 27
4.1.1 Workload modeling and application components ................................................................... 27
4.1.2 I/O profile mapping for representative applications ................................................................. 27
4.1.3 Workload criteria ............................................................................................................................. 28
4.2 Test configuration ................................................................................................................................... 29
4.2.1 FS7500 controllers and EqualLogic PS Series arrays ................................................................ 29
4.2.2 Host and Hypervisor ....................................................................................................................... 33
4.3 Test simulations and results .................................................................................................................. 35
4.3.1 Test results ........................................................................................................................................ 37
5 Best practices ................................................................................................................................................... 40
5.1 Storage ...................................................................................................................................................... 40
5.1.1 EqualLogic FS7500 recommendations ....................................................................................... 40
5.1.2 EqualLogic PS Series recommendations ..................................................................................... 40
5.2 Host and hypervisor ................................................................................................................................ 40