A match made in heaven?

Who am I? Richard Barlow Systems Architect and Engineering Manager for the Virginia Credit Union Worked in IT for almost 20 years Worked with VMware since 2.0.1

About Virginia Credit Union 1.8 Billion dollars net worth Nearly 200,000 members worldwide 13 branches, soon to be 15 To be our members’ trusted provider of financial services, helping them achieve greater success.

The VACU environment Presently running 200+ virtual machines in VMware across 18 nodes 80% virtualized HP Proliant DL series servers HP Proliant blade systems with Virtual Connect NetApp 6070 cluster for core storage NetApp 3020 cluster for DR Cisco networking infrastructure (6509 core ethernet, 9506 core fibre channel)

Why NFS? Simple Inexpensive Incredibly flexible with the right storage High performance LUNs have a single queue per volume, NFS is per object Superior locking technology Higher speed networks – 10GigE is here, 100 and 1,000 are on the horizon Jumbo frame support

Why NFS continued Leverages the best of both VMware and intelligent storage VMware does one thing extremely well – run VMs with low overhead and high speed Intelligent 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 demos Some screenshots from my production and dev environments Some live demos with VMware Workstation The demos are NetApp centric because that what I use Other storage vendors may offer comparable features

Live demo configuration

Areas of focus Deduplication Backup and recovery Volume cloning This is just the tip of the iceberg... I only have 25 minutes

Deduplication Deduplication removes duplicate blocks in a storage system Doing on disk what VMware does in RAM This can be done with Fiber Channel, but the result is less than impressive Since 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 magic You can literally watch your free space increase

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Deduplication – concluded With deduplication you can achieve the ultimate in efficient storage utilization Combined with thin provisioning, wasted space is a thing of the past

Backup and recovery How do we traditionally backup and recover VMware? Consolidated Backup NDMP Local 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 recovery Snapshots 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 recovery Scenario – 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 overview It was pretty much instant No backup devices (tape) required Minimum downtime We do it and it works!

Single file snapshot recovery You can also recover single files via a snapshot! Use a Linux loopback mount with the correct offset Do we have time for a demo?

DR Recovery Most storage systems also allow some sort of replication Why 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 Cloning Have 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 demo Scenario – You need a bunch of VDI clients for a special project Disk space is at a premium You don’t want to spend more time than necessary You have created a volume with a number of sysprepped XP VMs

Volume Cloning in production We had the challenge to create over 100 VDI clients for an internal application test We created a volume with 20 sysprepped XP VMs using VMware cloning We then FlexCloned this volume 5 times After all was said and done, we had over 100 VMs in less than 55GB of disk space No noticeable performance degradation

Conclusion NFS will change the way that you think about VMware You can leverage the power of intelligent storage “Once you use NFS, you will never want to plug in another piece of fiber channel again”