Manual

Picking the Right I/O Pieces, and Making Them Work Together
Tier-1 applicaons are uniquely demanding in many dimensions. Their needs with respect to CPU power,
memory footprint, high availability/failover, resiliency, and responsiveness to outside smuli is typically
unmatched within the enterprise. Moreover, Tier-1 applicaons also tend to be ghtly integrated with other
applicaons and resources within the enterprise. Because of this, virtualizing a Tier-1 applicaon requires
rigorous planning of the I/O strategy. There are ve steps to follow:
 Idenfy the I/O fabrics that the Tier-1 applicaons will use (it may very well be “all of them”).
 Quanfy the data ows for each fabric when the applicaon was operang on a standalone system.
 Esmate vMoon I/O needs for failovers and evoluon. Note that most vMoon trac will be storage
I/O; if the data stays within one external array during vMoon, vSphere’ vStorage API for Array
Integraon (VAAI) capability can reduce the I/O trac.
 Determine your primary and secondary I/O paths for mul-pathing on all of your networks.
 Determine QoS levels for the Tier-1 apps.
One simplifying opon available is to ulize a mul-protocol network adapter that can funcon as either a
Fibre Channel or Converged Network Adapter. The QLogic QLE2672 is an example of such an adapter; it can
be recongured in the eld to operate on 4/8 or Gen 5 Fibre Channel or 10Gb converged Ethernet networks.
Network I/O Planning
Networking Considerations When Virtualizing Tier-1 Applications
Pre-planning deployments is the most eecve way to ensure that
SLAs will be achieved, and expensive surprises will be avoided.
Planning