1© Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. EMC STORAGE OPTIMIZATION AND HIGH AVAILABILITY FOR MICROSOFT SQL SERVER 2008 R2 EMC VNX5700, EMC

1© Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

EMC STORAGE OPTIMIZATION AND HIGH AVAILABILITY FOR MICROSOFT SQL SERVER 2008 R2EMC VNX5700, EMC FAST Suite, VMware vSphere 5Strategic Solutions Engineering (SSE)EMC Solutions Group (ESG)

Michael MorrisDavid Ring


Agenda

• EMC Proven Solutions

• Solution architecture

• Design considerations

• Back-end SAS port balancing

• Sizing exercise

• Testing methodology

• Test results

• Summary


End-to-end capabilities for Microsoft EMC Consulting Services

Strategize • Advise • Architect • Implement • Manage • Support

EMC Solutions Group - Proven Solutions

Help customersidentify andovercome

their businesschallenges

Reduce risk anddeliver faster

implementations

Address uniqueindustry

challenges

Simplify managementof complexapplication

environments


Proven Solutions approach

Capture and

define

Test and validate

Document Publish

Singapore Shanghai,

China

Cork, Ireland

Hopkinton, MA

Santa Clara, CA

Vienna, Austria

1 2 3 4

Req

uire

men

ts

…we champion the customers…and test the solutions you would like


Storage Optimization for Microsoft SQL Server

The Challenge• Administrators asked to “do more with less”

• Optimizing storage without increasing data centre footprint

In this solution we show how EMC FAST Suite:

• Boosts performance of the EMC VNX performance platform

• Optimizes investment in EMC Flash technology

• Eliminates redesign of storage as I/O patterns change

• Eliminates need for continual manual intervention

“data in the right place at the right time”


Virtualization for Microsoft SQL Server

The Challenge

• Up to now virtualization of MS SQL Server limited to 8 vCPUs

In this solution we show how VMware vSphere 5 presents:

• Ability to scale up to 32 vCPUs per virtual machine

• Additional features– VMFS-5 volumes– Hot add CPU– Storage DRS– Multi-NIC vMotion“increases the number of large-scale

instances that can be virtualized ”


High Availability for Microsoft SQL Server

The Challenge

• Whether to adopt a VMware HA or WSFC solution

The decision should be based on these factors:

• Simplicity of design

• Are your applications cluster-aware

• Do you require maximum performance

• Do you require low Recovery Time Objectives (RTO)

“The answer is ...it depends!”


Solution architecture• WSFC

• FAST VP pool (40*SAS, 5*Flash drives)• RDM volumes

• Standalone• FAST VP pool (40*SAS, 5*Flash drives)• VMFS-5 volumes• 32 vCPU limit• Hot add CPU• Multi-NIC vMotion

• FAST Cache• 12 * 100 GB (shared resource)

• EMC VSI


Design considerations• Back-end SAS port balancing

• Workload balancing

• Balancing through LUN ownership

• Balancing through LUN I/O

• Balancing through feature utilization:– Multiple pools– FAST VP– FAST Cache


Back-end SAS port balancing

• If you are using only two back-end busses on a VNX5700, you should use ports 0 and 2, or 1 and 3 for the best performance.

• If you are using four or fewer back-end ports on a VNX7500, you should alternate ports on the SAS back-end I/O module for the best performance.


20 Disks (0-19) 5 Disk (20-24)

SAS (Pool 1 -Tier 1) RG 4T-Logs

4+14+14+14+1 2+2

20 Disks (0-19) 5 Disk (20-24)

SAS (Pool 1 -Tier 1) RG 1 (4+1)OS Volumes

4+14+14+14+1 4+1

FLARE Drives

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 140

FLASH DRIVES(Pool 1 – Tier 0)

FAST Cache (3 Mirrors)4+1 1mirror 1mirror 1 mirror

System DBs + Quorum

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 140

FLASH DRIVES (Pool 2 – Tier 0)

FAST Cache (3 Mirrors)4+1 1mirror 1mirror 1 mirror

HS Empty

20 Disks (0-19) 5 Disk (20-24)

SAS (Pool 2 – Tier 1)RG2

TempDB

4+14+14+14+1 HS

RG3TempD

B

2+2 2+2

20 Disks (0-19) 5 Disk (20-24)

SAS (Pool 2 – Tier 1)4+14+14+14+1 H

S

RG2TempD

B

RG3TempD

B

2+22+2

2.0

1.1

1.0

0.1

3.0

3.1

HS

SA

S B

ack e

nd

Bu

s 0

& 1

SA

S B

ack e

nd

Bu

s 2

& 3

SAS 10k rpm

Flash Drives

Legend

HS -Hot Spare

LUN 201

100%on SAS

LUN 202

100%on SAS

LUN 203

100%on SAS

LUN 204

100%on SAS

LUN 201

20.21%on Flash

LUN 202

22.03%on Flash

LUN 201

79.9%on SAS

LUN 202

77.97%on SAS

LUN 101

100%on SAS

LUN 102

100%on SAS

LUN 101

100%on SAS

LUN 102

100%on SAS

LUN 101

79.61%on SAS

LUN 102

78.57%on SAS

LUN 101

20.39%on Flash

LUN 102

21.43%on Flash


Sizing exercise: Rough order of magnitudeDrive type IOPS

Flash drive 3,500

SAS 15K rpm 180

SAS 10K rpm 150

NL-SAS 7.2K rpm 90

FAST CacheExpected to

service6 9,000 16,990

Expected Backend Disk IOPs = Host Read IOPs + 4 * Host Write IOPs

Host IOPs 25,000

Read / Write Ratio 9:1RAID Type RAID

5

IOPs = (0.9 * 25,000) + 4 * ( 0.1 * 25,000) = 32,500

FAST VP PoolExpected to

service45 23,500

Drive Type

Flash Drives

SAS 10k rpm

No of Disks

5

40

Drive IOPs

17,500

6,000

66% Drive IOPs

11,550

3,960

15,510


Testing methodology• Performance testing

– Baseline testing on 40 * SAS-only pool– Performance testing FAST VP-enabled pool (Flash and SAS)– Performance testing on a FAST VP pool with FAST Cache enabled– The following are the key metrics used:

• Throughput in IOPS (transfers/sec)• Throughput in transactions per sec (TPS)• Physical disk utilization (percent)• Storage processor utilization (percent)

• Failover testing– Planned– Unplanned

• VMware vSphere 5 functionality– EMC VSI– Hot –add CPU– Storage DRS

• Performing Upgrades


Performance test results


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 90

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

6,554 6,5597,523

11,41311,781

12,625

19,79621,273 22,062

7,881 7,883 8,661

12,226

15,744 16,247

25,784

29,135 29,409Pool 1: WSFC

À

• Solution supported 50k+ IOPs

• VMware PVSCSI adapter (SA) outperformed LSI Logic SAS (WSFC) by 25%

Performance Transfer/sec (IOPs)

Baseline FAST VP relocation Fast Cache

2 hour 4 hours 2 hours


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 90

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

945 9421,080

1,671 1,7271,871

2,9863,129

3,293

1,157 1,154 1,246

1,804

2,354 2,434

3,915

4,446 4,484Pool 1: WSFC

Pool 2: Standalone

À

• Transaction/sec (TPS) mirror s IOPs, VMware PVSCSI adapter (SA) outperformed LSI Logic SAS (WSFC)

Performance Transactions/sec (TPS)




1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 90%

25%

50%

75%

100%

78% 78% 76%

66%66%

66%

16%13% 15%

27%

51%

44% 45%

74%65%

74%

91% 91% 90% 90%85% 82%

19%19% 20%21%

54%

67%64%

76%82% 82%

Pool 1: WSFC (SAS)

Pool 1: WSFC (Flash)

À

• Flash drives in FAST VP Pools alleviate pressure on SAS disks

• FAST Cache further helps by servicing I/O requirments from SAS disks

Performance Physical Disk Utilization (%)




1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 90%

25%

50%

75%

100%

18% 18%

30% 32%27% 28%

45%

41%46%

20% 20%

32%41% 41%

34%

45%48%

48%

SPA - Pool 1: WSFC

SPB - Pool 2: Standalone

À

• Storage Processor Utilization balanced through Pool/LUN ownership

Performance Storage Processor Utilization

(%)



0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

19% 17% 18%

32%40%

18%

19%

19%

20% 19% 20% 31%

45%

21% 21% 20%

SPA Pool 1: WSFC

Flash drives being added to pools


Failover test results


Failover test results

Typical example of a calculation for vMotion with one NIC is:

61 GB or 62,464 MB / 109.672 MB/s (920,000,000bytes/1024^2/8)

= (569.55sec /60)

= 9 minutes 49 seconds

Scenario WSFC Standalone

Planned manual failover (no load) 48s

1 NIC: 9m 39s

2 NICs: 4m 44s

4 NICs: 2m 25s

Planned manual failover (under load) 49s

1 NIC: 23m 52s

2 NICs: 8m 21s

4 NICs: 3m 4s

Unplanned failover - pulled power (no load)

1m 35s 6m 10s


Feature testing


EMC VSI provisioning new storage

• EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is a vSphere client plug-in that provides a single interface to manage EMC storage


EMC VSI Storage View

• Select EMC VSI tab in vCenterView to see:

– Datastores– Pools– LUNs


vSphere 5 Hot Add CPU functionality

• Test showed how the solution succeeded in adding CPUs on a running Microsoft SQL Server virtual machine by using hot add without interruption to the workload.


vSphere 5: Storage DRS - I/O load balancing

• Storage DRS monitoring user-set I/O latency threshold

• Relocations can be manual or automatic


vSphere 5: Storage DRS – Space load balancing

• Exceeding the user set threshold, Storage DRS will recommend migration of VMDKs to a datastore with sufficient space


Performing upgrades


Performing upgrades: WSFCOS and SQL Server rolling patch upgrade using WSFC• Process flow

– Patch passive node– Failover cluster– Patch active node– Failover cluster

* The services must stop on one node, and then start on the other. Therefore, WSFC does not provide a nondisruptive upgrade


Performing upgrades: VMware option

OS and SQL Server rolling patch upgrade using standby virtual machine• Process flow

– Patch standby virtual machine– On primary virtual machine

• Stop client connections• Detach SQL Server database(s)• Remove virtual disk(s)

– On standby virtual machine• Attach virtual disk(s) to standby virtual machine• Attach SQL Server database(s) • Enable client connections to assume primary role

– Patch old primary

*The difference is the requirement to detach storage from one virtual machine and reattach to another, this can be scripted to complete automatically


Summary• The VNX5700 can easily service over 50,000 Microsoft SQL

Server OLTP-like IOPS.

• The VMware native adapter with VMFS-5 volumes consistently outperforms the LSI adapter with physical RDMs in this configuration.

• The combination of FAST VP and FAST Cache as part of the FAST Suite, allows the VNX series storage arrays to optimize storage efficiency and service increased I/O.

• The solution compares the WSFC and VMware standalone virtual machine options, and highlights the performance and RTO benefits of each solution.

• The solution highlights the hot add functionality for adding CPU resources in vSphere 5.

• The solution also demonstrates vSphere Storage DRS functionality and its ability to balance storage resources through vMotion, based on I/O and capacity, either manually or automatically.


Q&A?


THANK YOU

Documents

1© Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. EMC STORAGE OPTIMIZATION AND HIGH AVAILABILITY FOR MICROSOFT SQL SERVER 2008 R2 EMC VNX5700, EMC