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BP1024 Scaling and Best Practices for Virtual Workload Environments with the FS7500 35
The physical connectivity details illustrated in Figure 24 are explained below:
• Six PS6100X series arrays (three PS Series arrays for first test and six PS Series arrays
for the second and third tests) were used for scaling of FS7500. The arrays were
connected in redundant fashion to two Dell PowerConnect 7048 stacked switches.
• Jumbo frames with MTU size 9216 and flow control was enabled on the two stacked
PowerConnect 7048 switches that were used to connect the SAN network
• Back-end of four FS7500 controllers (two controllers for the first and second test and
four for the third) were connected in redundant fashion to the two stacked PC7048
SAN switches. The NICs on the FS7500 controllers for both SAN and internal
networks were connected to the switches.
• The FS7500 front-end client network NICs were connected in redundant fashion to
two stacked LAN switches comprising PowerConnect 7048.
• Four NIC ports on each host were connected to the stacked LAN switches in
redundant fashion. For the corresponding ports on the switch, static LAG was turned
ON and the load balancing algorithm for them was set to “source and destination IP
hashing”.
• Jumbo frame were set both on the ESXi host vSwitch (MTU size 9000) and on the
switch ports (MTU size 9216).
• The same ports that were connected to the LAN switch were used to build a vSwitch
on the host. The load balancing algorithm on this vSwitch was set to load balancing
based on IP hash
• A vmknic port on the vSwitch was used to connect to the NFS exports from the
FS7500 systems
4.3 Test simulations and results
The workload and VM block defined in previously was implemented for testing. Iometer ran on each
VM and was used to generate the I/O workload. The results were recorded after the tests were run for
eight hours ensuring the systems were in a stable state.
Test 1:
For the first test, 20 VMs were built across two ESXi hosts. Workloads defined in Table 3 were run on
each VM to achieve the ideal targeted I/O mix. For this workload mix, the response time was higher
than 20ms. In order to cap the response time to 20 ms, the load on all VMs was proportionally
reduced so that one block would saturate the One FS7500-three array configuration. The revised
achieved I/O mix is given in Table 4. The table lists the planned IOPS per VM and then lists the actual
IOPs per VM.