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BP1024 Scaling and Best Practices for Virtual Workload Environments with the FS7500 33
4.2.2 Host and Hypervisor
Two PowerEdge R815s were used as ESXi hosts. Both of the hosts access the three datastores using
the eight VIP addresses for the first and second configuration and 16 VIP addresses for third
configuration. For the first configuration, one block consisting of 20 VMs was equally divided over
these two hosts such that the I/O load on each host was equal. For the second and third
configuration, two (40 VMs) and three (60 VMs) blocks respectively were divided between the two
hosts. A block of VMs is described in section 4.1.2 earlier.
Figure 23 shows the overall logical components used in the test configuration.
Figure 23 Logical test configuration
Figure 24 shows the physical connections between the host servers and storage components in the
setup, and two additional servers were used to monitor and manage the setup. A Dell PowerEdge R710
server was used to host the VMware vCenter management station. The same R710 server also hosted
EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters (SANHQ) and EqualLogic Group Manager UI. The same server was also
used to gather the performance statistics on the ESXi hosts using ‘esxtop’ utility via SSH. A Dell
PowerEdge 1950 server ran a custom script to monitor the TCP retransmission statistics from the
switches on the iSCSI network. The 1950 server also ran a script to gather performance statistics via
Windows ‘perfmon’ utility on all the virtual machines. The physical connectivity of the ESXi hosts to the
FS7500 systems and the physical connectivity of the FS7500 systems to PS Series arrays is illustrated in
figure below.
Perfmon