White Paper
EMC Solutions Group
Abstract
This white paper describes an automated storage tiering solution for multiple mission-critical applications virtualized with VMware vSphere® on the EMC® Symmetrix® VMAX® 40K storage platform. EMC SRDF® coordination with EMC FAST™ VP provides site-to-site replication for disaster recovery and assured performance by automatically monitoring and tuning storage at the sub-LUN level at both sites.
September 2012
EMC INFRASTRUCTURE
FOR VMWARE CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS
EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K, EMC Symmetrix FAST VP, EMC SRDF,
NEC Express5800/A1080a-E, VMware vSphere 5.0
•
Simplified storage management with FAST VP
•
Remote replication with assured performance
Copyright © 2012 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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VMware, ESX, vMotion, VMware vCenter, and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions
All trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Part Number H10568.1
Contents
Executive summary ... 7 Business case ... 7 Solution overview ... 7 Key results ... 8 Introduction ... 9 Purpose ... 9 Scope ... 9 Audience... 9 Solution overview ... 10 Overview ... 10 Key components ... 10 Physical architecture ... 11 Hardware resources ... 12 Software resources ... 13 Storage environment ... 14EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K ... 14
EMC Virtual Provisioning ... 14
EMC FAST VP ... 14
EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) ... 15
EMC Unisphere for VMAX ... 15
EMC Symmetrix FAST VP ... 17
FAST VP overview ... 17
FAST VP components ... 17
FAST VP performance measurement and data movement ... 18
FAST VP allocate by policy ... 18
FAST VP with OLTP workload ... 19
FAST VP with DSS workload ... 19
FAST VP with SRDF ... 19
Server Environment ... 21
NEC Express5800/ A1080a-E overview ... 21
VMware vSphere 5.0 ... 22
VMware vSphere 5.0 overview ... 22
VMware vSphere configuration... 22
Overview of mission-critical applications deployed in this solution ... 26
Overview ... 26
Microsoft SQL Server ... 26
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 ... 26
SAP ERP and NetWeaver ... 26
Application profile ... 27
Storage design for consolidation of applications on VMAX 40K ... 28
Overview ... 28
Front-end port usage and zoning ... 28
Thin pool configuration ... 29
FAST VP configuration ... 29
Storage design considerations for mission-critical database applications with FAST VP ... 30
Configuring EMC Symmetrix FAST VP with Unisphere for VMAX ... 31
Overview of FAST VP configuration ... 31
Step 1: Enable the FAST controller and set the control parameters ... 31
Step 2: Create storage tiers ... 32
Step 3: Create FAST policies ... 32
Step 4: Associate storage groups with FAST policies and enable RDF coordination... 33
Step 5: Configure FAST VP monitoring and move windows ... 34
Cascaded storage groups ... 35
Site protection with SRDF ... 35
Performance testing and validation results ... 36
Overview ... 36
Validation ... 36
Test scenarios ... 36
End-to-end validation with FAST VP under normal conditions ... 37
Objectives ... 37
Application workloads ... 37
Storage performance overview ... 37
FAST VP capacity use by storage group ... 39
SAP test result overview ... 40
Oracle OLTP test results overview ... 41
SQL OLTP test result overview ... 42
SQL DSS test result overview ... 43
Summary of results ... 44
FAST VP workload tuning validation ... 45
Configuration ... 45
Policy tuning results and analysis ... 46
Summary of results ... 49
RDF coordination with continuous production workload ... 50
Objectives ... 50
RDF coordination overview ... 50
Test summary... 51
Failover with performance continuity ... 52
Objectives ... 52
Failover test results ... 52
Test summary... 54 Conclusion ... 55 Summary ... 55 Findings ... 55 References ... 57 White papers ... 57 Product documentation ... 57 Other documentation ... 57
Appendix A: Detailed application design and LUN layout ... 58
Overview ... 58
SAP overview ... 58
SAP ERP 6.0 ... 58
SAP IDES ... 58
HP LoadRunner ... 58
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications ... 59
SAP system architecture ... 59
SAP landscape ... 60
LoadRunner landscape ... 62
SAP LUN Configuration ... 62
Oracle Database 11g R2 ... 62
Oracle ASM ... 63
Oracle grid infrastructure ... 63
Oracle database and workload profile ... 63
Oracle workload description ... 64
Oracle database schema ... 64
Oracle database services ... 65
Microsoft SQL Server ... 65
SQL Server 2012 DSS workload ... 65
SQL Server 2012 DSS LUN configuration ... 66
SQL Server 2012 OLTP workload ... 66
SQL Server 2012 OLTP LUN configuration ... 66
SQL Server 2012 and Windows 2008 R2 settings for DSS and OLTP workload ... 67
Appendix B: Configuring Symmetrix remote replication ... 68
Executive summary
As today’s enterprises look to increase workforce productivity and transform their business, they are moving their database and applications to the private cloud. As a result, IT organizations face more demanding business objectives for more efficiency and improved quality of service, including:
• Maximizing the use of storage assets
• Maintaining performance levels at both production sites and business continuity sites
• Reducing capital expenditures and ongoing costs
To meet this challenge, IT organizations are evolving to provide more agile service delivery and to design their architecture for the future. At the same time, they must still cost-effectively manage their business requirements and service levels. To achieve this, organizations are beginning to offer IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) by taking advantage of:
• Resource pooling • Virtualization
• Dynamic and virtual provisioning • Commodity computing
EMC® Symmetrix® VMAX® 40K with Enginuity™ 5876, along with Unisphere® for VMAX, EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST™ VP), and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF®), are ideally suited to support the demands of the evolving enterprise infrastructure. By simplifying storage management and improving capacity use, these tools provide an infrastructure foundation that meets real business needs, including:
• Automated performance tuning—With FAST VP enabled, the storage array continuously tunes the application based on the access patterns, allowing you to monitor performance using Unisphere’s performance analyzer.
• Simplified storage—The FAST VP allocate-by-policy feature simplifies the capacity management of FAST VP environments. It allocates storage based on performance metrics, or from any tier in the FAST policy that has space. • Assured performance at the disaster recovery (DR) site—FAST VP coordination
with SRDF supports SRDF for tiering on the remote array, enabling optimized performance at both sites.
• Ease of management—Unisphere for VMAX provides an intuitive task-orientated interface for configuring and monitoring VMAX arrays, enabling simplified provisioning.
NEC Express5800/A1080a series is the base server platform of this solution.
Representing the fifth generation of enterprise server architecture from NEC, this line of servers maintains NEC’s legacy for developing scalable enterprise servers that offer exceptional configuration flexibility, capacity, reliability and availability features.
Business case
Pairing the NEC Express5800/A1080a-E with VMware vSphere® 5.0, the platform creates an outstanding solution for enterprise virtualization needs.
Our testing shows that this solution, based on EMC Symmetrix VMAX with Enginuity 5876, FAST VP, and SRDF, provides the following performance results:
• Sustained high performance levels for multiple critical database applications deployed on virtual storage, managed and automatically tuned by EMC FAST VP.
• FAST VP responds quickly to workload changes. Flexible policies are a powerful tool to further enhance performance when required.
• In the event of a failover to remote site, FAST VP SRDF coordination ensures performance at the DR replication site, bringing the benefits of FAST to the remote site.
Introduction
This white paper describes the design, testing, and validation of an enterprise VMware infrastructure using the EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K storage platform with Enginuity 5876, EMC FAST VP, and EMC SRDF as its foundation. This solution demonstrates the performance, scalability, and application-specific functionality of the solution using multiple, representative application environments including Microsoft SQL, Oracle, and SAP.
Specifically, this solution:
• Validates the performance and scalability of the test environment based on industry-standard online transaction processing (OLTP) and decision support system (DSS) benchmarks.
• Demonstrates simpler management using FAST VP allocation to a FAST policy. This allows data to be written to any pool defined by a FAST policy, simplifying capacity management.
• Demonstrates how FAST VP SRDF-coordination enables enterprise applications to seamlessly replicate virtual provisioned devices under FAST VP control at the production site to the replicated site.
• Demonstrates the responsiveness of FAST VP to changing performance requirements. You can tune FAST VP policies to enable storage administrators to dynamically increase performance for applications from storage on request.
This white paper discusses multiple EMC products as well as those from other vendors. Some general configuration and operational procedures are outlined. However, for detailed product installation information, refer to the user
documentation for provided with those products.
This white paper is intended for EMC employees, partners, and customers including IT planners, virtualization architects and administrators, and any other IT professionals involved in evaluating, acquiring, managing, operating, or designing infrastructure that leverages EMC technologies.
Throughout this white paper we assume that you have some familiarity with the concepts and operations related to enterprise storage and virtualization technologies and their use in information infrastructures.
Purpose
Scope
Solution overview
EMC solutions are validated architectures that are designed to reflect real-world deployments. This section describes the key components, resources, and overall architecture that make up the solution and its environment.
The key elements used in this solution include: • EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K storage array • EMC FAST VP
• EMC Unisphere for VMAX • NEC Express5800/A1080a-E • VMware vSphere
These elements are described in more detail in subsequent sections.
Overview
Figure 1 depicts the physical architecture for the solution described in this white paper.
Figure 1. Physical architecture diagram
This solution is built on EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K arrays running Enginuity 5876. Both source and target arrays provide a mix of Flash, FC, and SATA/SAS drives. FAST VP continually monitors and tunes performance by relocating data across storage tiers based on access patterns and predefined FAST policies. This continuous tuning occurs on both sites using the FAST VP SRDF coordination feature.
We provisioned Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (two OLTP and one DSS), Oracle 11g R2 (OLTP), and a full SAP landscape running on Oracle. These applications ran on virtual machines in a VMware vSphere5 environment on EMC VMAX 40K storage, replicating to a DR site using SRDF.
Load generation tools drove each of these applications simultaneously to validate the infrastructure and function of the FAST VP RDF coordination. We replicated the
environment to a remote site within synchronous RDF distance over two 8-Gb/s FC links. Failover was performed to verify the performance of applications at the remote site.
Physical architecture
The production site enterprise server environment was built on NEC
Express5800/A1080a-E servers. This enterprise scalable server supports demanding Oracle OLTP, Microsoft SQL OLTP and DSS, and SAP workload on virtual machines. The effects of applying the FAST policy are documented in Performance testing and validation results.
Table 1 lists the hardware resources used in the solution environment. Table 1. Hardware resources
Equipment Quantity Configuration EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K
Enginuity 5876
2 3-engine, 128-GB cache per engine 33 Flash 200 GB (including 1 HS)
132 × 600-GB 15k FC drives (including 6 HS) 70 × 2 TB 7.2k SATA/SAS drives (including 3 HS)
Production site servers NEC Express5800/ A1080a-E
2 Production Site (Site A)
8 CPUs (10 C/2.40 GHZ/30 MB cache) 1 TB RAM
4 GbE IP Ports
4 × 146-GB 2.5-in. 15k SAS Disks 1 × internal RAID controller 12 × 8 PCIe slots/2 × 16 PCIe slots 2 × dual-port 8-Gb/s HBAs (4 FC) 1 × quad GbE NIC
Disaster recovery site servers
2 2 CPUs (10 C/2.40 GHZ/30 MB cache) 384 GB memory
2 x dual-port 8-Gb/s HBAs (4 FC) 1 x quad GbE NIC
SAN 1 8 Gb SAN backbone
Hardware resources
Table 2 lists the software resources used in the solution environment. Table 2. Software resources
Software Version
EMC Symmetrix VMAX Enginuity code 5876 EMC Power Path®/VE for VMware 5.7 EMC Unisphere for VMAX 1 EMC Solutions Enabler 7.4 VMware vSphere 5 (Enterprise Plus) 5.0.1
SAP 6.4
Oracle ASMlib 2.0.5 Oracle Database 11g R2 11.2.0.3 Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Microsoft SQL Server 2012 RTM Microsoft MSTPC E Toolkit 1.12.0 Quest Benchmark Factory 5.8.1 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.7
SwingBench 2.3
Storage environment
EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K with Enginuity version 5876 provides the tiered storage configuration used in the test environment. The two primary Symmetrix VMAX features employed were FAST VP and SRDF.
Built on the strategy of simple, intelligent, modular storage, the solution incorporates a highly scalable Virtual Matrix Architecture™ that enables Symmetrix VMAX arrays to grow seamlessly and cost-effectively from an entry-level configuration into the world’s largest storage system. Symmetrix VMAX supports Flash drives, FC drives, and SATA drives within a single array, as well as an extensive range of RAID types.
The EMC Enginuity operating environment controls all components in the Symmetrix VMAX array. Enginuity 5876 for Symmetrix VMAX offers:
• More efficiency: New zero-downtime technology for migrations (technology refreshes) and lower costs with automated tiering
• More scalability: Up to two times more performance, with the ability to manage up to 10 times more capacity per storage administrator
• More security: Built-in encryption, RSA-integrated key management, increased value for virtual server and mainframe environments, replication
enhancements, and a new e-licensing model
EMC Virtual Provisioning™ is EMC’s implementation of thin provisioning. It is
designed to simplify storage management, improve capacity utilization, and enhance performance. Virtual Provisioning provides for the separation of physical storage devices from the storage devices as perceived by host systems. This enables
nondisruptive provisioning and more efficient storage use. This solution uses virtually provisioned storage for all deployed applications.
For detailed information on virtual provisioning, refer to the EMC Solutions Enabler
Symmetrix Array Controls CLI v7.4 Product Guide.
EMC FAST VP is a feature of Enginuity version 5875 and higher that provides
automatic storage tiering at the sub-LUN level. Virtual pools are Virtual Provisioning thin pools.
FAST VP is a key component of the solution described in this white paper. For a detailed overview, see EMC Symmetrix FAST VP.
EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K
EMC Virtual Provisioning
The EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) family of software is a suite of remote storage replication solutions for DR and business continuity. The SRDF family offers deployment flexibility and scalability, delivering distance-replication capabilities and helping customers meet mixed service-level requirements with minimal effect on operations. SRDF features include:
• Massively-parallel high performance that delivers unsurpassed recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), with little effect on servers.
• Zero data exposure, very long-distance capability, and multi-hop functionality that enable you to optimize resources while meeting mixed service levels. • Coordinated processing across multiple sets of data and systems that
enhances enterprise-wide application restart.
• Seamless integration with hundreds of leading enterprise, storage, and backup applications that enables faster deployment and simpler management.
• Flexible, automated, and easy-to-use management options to ensure continuous protection of your data.
• Integration with FAST VP for coordinating performance movement at the source and target sites.
EMC Unisphere for VMAX is an advanced graphical user interface (GUI) for managing Symmetrix VMAX arrays. Unisphere for VMAX enables you to provision, manage, and monitor any Symmetrix VMAX array from one screen and significantly reduces storage administration time.
As shown in Figure 2 (page 16), Unisphere for VMAX uses the same GUI framework as the unified EMC VNX® platforms. For customers who use Symmetrix VMAX and VNX in the same data center, Unisphere provides a consistent look and feel that simplifies management operations.
Unisphere provides a web browser interface that enables the following operations: • Access management
• Configuration management • Replication management
• Monitoring and alerts, performance analysis, and reporting
EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF)
EMC Unisphere for VMAX
Figure 2 shows the Unisphere for VMAX user interface.
EMC Symmetrix FAST VP
FAST VP provides support for sub-LUN data movement in thinly provisioned environments. It combines the advantages of Virtual Provisioning with automatic storage tiering at the sub-LUN level to optimize performance and cost, while radically simplifying storage management and increasing storage efficiency.
FAST VP data movement between tiers is based on performance measurement and user-defined policies, and is executed automatically and nondisruptively by FAST VP. This section provides an overview of FAST VP features and functionality. Configuring EMC Symmetrix FAST VP outlines the main steps for configuring FAST VP on
Symmetrix VMAX and the settings defined for the solution.
As shown in Figure 3, configuring FAST VP involves three types of components— storage groups, FAST policies, and storage tiers:
• A storage group is a logical grouping of storage devices used for common management. A storage group is associated with a FAST policy that determines how the storage group’s devices are allocated across tiers.
• A FAST policy is a set of tier usage rules that is applied to associated storage groups. A FAST policy can specify up to three tiers and assigns an upper usage limit for each tier. These limits determine how much data from a storage group can reside on each tier included in the policy.
Administrators can set high-performance policies that use more Flash drive capacity for critical applications, and cost-optimized policies that use more SATA drive capacity for less-critical applications.
• A storage tier is made up of one or more virtual pools. To be a member of a tier, a virtual pool must contain only data devices that match the technology type, drive speed, and RAID protection type of the tier.
Figure 3. FAST VP components
FAST VP overview
FAST VP components
In summary, by simply pooling storage resources, defining a policy, and applying it to the application, FAST VP automatically and dynamically moves application data to the tier that best suits the level of service required.
FAST VP works at the sub-LUN level, introducing finer granularities of both performance measurement and data movement, and can spread the data from a single thin device across multiple tiers.
The sub-LUN metrics collected for thin devices under FAST VP control contain measurements that enable FAST VP to make separate data movement requests for every 7,680 KB unit of storage that makes up the thin device. This unit of storage consists of 10 contiguous thin device extents and is known as an extent group. FAST VP algorithms perform two types of moves:
• Compliance movement: Initially, FAST VP distributes data across the different tiers to enforce compliance with the data’s associated FAST policy.
• Performance movement: When compliance with the policy is achieved, FAST VP continues moving data between tiers to optimize performance, while
maintaining compliance with the policy.
FAST VP automatic analysis identifies the busiest extent groups and moves them to the highest-performing Flash tier. It also identifies inactive extent groups and moves them to the SATA tier.
This results in the thin device’s data being distributed across multiple thin pools. Because the most active data is residing on the highest-performing storage devices, application response times are unaffected.
FAST VP continuously tunes the storage resources to ensure that the right data is placed on the right tier at the right time with automatic analysis and data re-tiering happening at all times
Configuring EMC Symmetrix FAST VP outlines the main steps for configuring FAST VP on Symmetrix VMAX and the settings defined for the solution.
To further simplify the management and capacity planning of FAST VP environments, Enginuity 5876 and Solutions Enabler 7.4 provides FAST VP allocation by policy. This system-wide setting ensures that new allocations for thin devices associated with FAST VP policies no longer only come from the pool to which a thin device is bound but from any one of the tiers associated with the FAST policy. FAST VP attempts to allocate new writes in the most appropriate tier first, based on available performance metrics. If no performance metrics are available, the allocation is attempted in the pool the device is bound to. If the bound tier cannot service a new allocation because it is full, the tracks are allocated from one of the remaining tiers.
EMC recommends that you enable the VP allocation by FAST policy.
Note For more information on the decision-making process of the VP allocation by FAST policy feature, see the “Advanced FAST VP features”section of
Implementing Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) for
EMC Symmetrix VMAX Series Arrays—Technical Notes.
FAST VP performance measurement and data movement FAST VP allocate by policy
FAST VP is an enabling technology for workloads with small, random I/O and
relatively small working sets that fit into the higher-performing tiers of a FAST policy. OLTP databases tend to be highly random in nature, with small working sets
compared to the total database size. Additionally, OLTP databases have inherent locality of reference with varied I/O patterns, for the following reasons:
• The relative importance of data changes from object to object. Some tables tend to be accessed more than others.
• The number of IOPS per object size in gigabytes, also known as object intensity, changes quite significantly. A good example is a database index compared with a database table. The relative IOPS received by a database block occupied by an index object can be very high compared to the IOPS received by a database block consumed by a table object.
Note Database redo logs have a very predictable sequential write workload, and this type of activity does not benefit significantly from tiering up to Flash. EMC recommends that you either exclude these logs from any FAST policy or pin them to their existing tier so that FAST VP will not include them in its analysis.
FAST VP is also an enabling technology for DSS workloads. Data warehouses often grow into very large database environments due to the growth of application data and increased regulatory requirements. The value of business data stored in the data warehouse can change over time, and availability as well as performance change accordingly.
Data warehouse applications tend to issue scan-intensive operations that access large data portions of the data at a time and also commonly perform bulk loading operations. These operations result in larger I/O sizes than OLTP workloads do and they require a storage subsystem that can provide the necessary throughput. This makes throughput, or megabytes per second (MB/s), the critical metric.
Although Flash disk storage can provide more than 100 MB/s of throughput, generally it is best suited to serving a small portion of the database’s hot data. Therefore, in this solution, we used a two-tier policy consisting of FC and SATA storage to provide a cost-efficient mix of storage to satisfy the needs of a DSS workload.
A core feature of Enginuity 5876 is the SRDF enhancement to consider remote devices (for example, R2) in a FAST VP policy. Previously, FAST VP operated independently on each side of the SRDF link.
Before Enginuity 5876, FAST VP promotion and demotion decisions were based on the workload seen by each individual device. While a source device (R1) would typically undergo a read and write workload mix, the corresponding target device would only see a write workload. Reads against the R1 were not reflected across the link. As a result, the R2 device data might not be located on the same tier as the corresponding data on the R1 device.
Enginuity 5876 introduces SRDF awareness for FAST VP. The performance metrics collected for R1 devices are periodically transmitted across the link to the
corresponding R2 devices. On the R2 device, the R1 performance metrics are merged
FAST VP with OLTP workload
FAST VP with DSS workload
with the actual R2 metrics. FAST VP takes into account the workload on the R1 device and then makes promotion and demotion decisions for the R2 device data. In an SRDF swap operation, which reverses the direction of replication, FAST VP statistics are automatically transferred to the new target site. SRDF coordination must be enabled at both sites.
FAST VP SRDF coordination can operate in synchronous, asynchronous, and adaptive copy modes. It also supports concurrent SRDF configurations.
For detailed information on this feature, see the “Advanced Features” section of
Implementing Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) for EMC
Symmetrix VMAX Series Arrays—Technical Notes.
Figure 4 illustrates FAST VP coordinated movement with SRDF.
Server Environment
The NEC Express5800/A1080a is NEC’s flagship, highly scalable HA enterprise server. Boasting a maximum memory configuration of 2 TB and eight CPU sockets, the NEC Express5800/A1080a is both highly scalable and highly flexible.
The NEC Express5800/A1080a has many key design features that are ideal for mix-workload large-scale virtualization. Below is a few of the technological advances that make consolidating entire database, application, and Web infrastructures onto a single NEC Express5800/A1080a the preferred solution to growing IT needs.
• Featuring the Intel Xeon E7 series of processor and eight processor sockets, the NEC Express5800/A1080a can expand to as many as 80 cores (160 threads) of CPU power. This means that by using vSphere 5.0, which has an achievable maximum of 25 vCPUs per core depending on workload, NEC
Express5800/A1080a has the potential to run 2,000 vCPUs. With this increased processing capacity, overall virtual machine capacity is expanded and vCPUs are more optimally utilized.
• With these large core and thread capacities, ancillary but necessary functions, such as live migration and backup processes, need not interfere with
application processing. The NEC Express5800/A1080a and Intel Xeon E7 series processors provide ample resources to ensure virtual machines are never starved for compute power, even during maintenance activities.
• The NEC Express5800/A1080a is ideal not only for Web server and application server virtualization, but also for database server virtualization and other workloads that may require high I/O capabilities. The NEC
Express5800/A1080a, designed with 12 x 8 and 2 x 16 PCI Express 2.0 slots, can handle large numbers of multiple-port NICs and HBAs for many I/O connections to external networks or storage devices as well as provide sufficient connection redundancy.
• NEC Express5800/A1080a has full support for Direct I/O. This feature, called VMDirectPath for vSphere, allows virtual machines direct access to physical NIC and HBA ports without using para-virtualized adapters. With the large number of I/O slots, Direct I/O is a feature you might want to use for specialized virtual machines and workloads. If you opt to use this feature, use special caution and consult the latest VMware documentation.
NEC Express5800/ A1080a-E overview
VMware vSphere 5.0
For the solution, the Microsoft SQL, Oracle, and SAP application servers are fully virtualized using VMware vSphere 5. This section describes the virtualization infrastructure, which uses the following components and options:
• VMware vSphere 5.0.1 • VMware® vCenter™ Server • VMware vSphere vMotion®
• EMC PowerPath/VE for VMware vSphere Version 5.7
VMware vSphere 5.0
VMware vSphere 5.0 is a complete, scalable, and powerful virtualization platform, with infrastructure services that transform IT hardware into a high-performance shared computing platform, and application services that help IT organizations deliver the highest levels of availability, security, and scalability.
VMware vCenter Server
VMware vCenter is the centralized management platform for vSphere environments, enabling control and visibility at every level of the virtual infrastructure.
VMware vSphere vMotion
VMware vSphere vMotion supports the live migration of virtual machines across servers with no disruption to users or any loss of service.
Storage vMotion is VMware technology that enables live migration of a virtual machine’s storage without any interruption in the availability of the virtual machine. This allows the relocation of live virtual machines to new data stores.
EMC PowerPath/VE
EMC PowerPath/VE for VMware vSphere delivers PowerPath multipathing features to optimize VMware vSphere virtual environments. PowerPath/VE installs as a kernel module on the VMware ESXi™ host and works as a multipathing plug-in (MPP) that provides enhanced path management capabilities to ESXi hosts.
VMware vCenter Server provides a scalable and extensible platform to centrally manage VMware vSphere environments, providing control and visibility at every level of the virtual infrastructure.
In this solution’s virtual environment, we configured four VMware vSphere 5.0 servers to host virtual machines at the production and DR sites. A fifth ESXi sever hosted the management virtual machines and vCenter servers.
At Site A, two ESXi5 hosts connect to the VMAX 40K array. Host A runs virtual machines for Oracle and SAP applications, and Host B runs the Microsoft SQL OLTP and DSS virtual machines serving as the production environment (R1).
At Site B, separate ESXi 5 hosts connect to the DR environment (R2) and are used to mount the virtual machines in the event of a failover. Figure 5 shows an excerpt from
VMware vSphere 5.0 overview
VMware vSphere configuration
vCenter with the virtual machines running at the production site and the standby hosts at Site B.
Figure 5. Production (Site A) and DR (Site B) shown in vCenter
All virtual machines in this configuration use virtual machine disks (VMDK) from VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) data store volumes. Each VMFS data store hosts a single VMDK disk, ensuring high performance and zero contention. This practice also ensures you have the ability to restore at an application level with EMC TimeFinder Clone/Snap on the VMAX 40K array.
Table 3 shows the virtual machines CPU and memory allocation for each application virtual machine.
Table 3. Virtual machine CPU and memory allocation
Application Virtual machine name CPU count Memory size
Oracle ORACLEDB 12 54,272 MB SAP SAPDI1 8 16,384 MB SAPDI2 8 16,384 MB SAPASCS 2 4,096 MB SAPCI 8 16,384 MB SAPDB 16 32,768 MB Microsoft SQL DSS SQLTPCH01 32 131,072 MB VMware virtual machine configuration
Application Virtual machine name CPU count Memory size Microsoft SQL OLTP SQLTPCE01 16 32,768 MB
SQLTPCE02 16 32,768 MB Domain controller 4 4,096 MB Because the virtual machines are replicated to Site B, the virtual machine CPU and memory configuration is identical at both sites.
Full details of the LUNs provisioned for each virtual machine are found in Appendix A: Detailed application design and LUN layout.
Selecting the SCSI driver type for data LUNs
VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters are high-performance storage drivers that can improve throughput and reduce CPU use. PVSCSI adapters are best suited for SAN environments, where hardware or applications drive high I/O throughput. As show in Figure 6, the SCSI controller’s type changed to paravirtual to improve the driver efficiency. The default SCSI controller driver is LSI Logic SAS. LUNs are spread across all available SCSI drivers.
Figure 6. SCSI controllers
EMC Virtual Storage Integrator
EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) provides enhanced visibility into Symmetrix VMAX 40K directly from the vCenter GUI. Figure 7 shows the data store and storage pool information, which provides information about virtual pool usage for the Oracle_SOE1_1 data store.
Figure 7. Data store and storage pool information viewed from VSI
VMAX 40K volumes host the VMFS data stores for this solution. Figure 7 shows the ESXi server and the Symmetrix VMAX 40K storage mapping with details about VMFS data stores and the LUNs. The Storage Viewer identifies details about VMFS data stores such as the VMAX storage volumes hosting the data store, the paths to the physical storage, pool usage information, and data store performance statistics. Figure 8 shows the LUN view from VSI. From here, administrators can identify the Symmetrix device ID for LUNs and data stores, if user-defined labels are set on VMAX LUNs. Administrators can export these listings to CSV files for manipulation with VMware PowerCLI scripts for rapid provisioning of data stores to ESXi hosts.
Overview of mission-critical applications deployed in this solution
This section gives a brief overview of the applications deployed in the test environment, including:
• Microsoft SQL Server • Oracle Database • SAP ERP
Detailed configuration information is included in Appendix A: Detailed application design and LUN layout.
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is the latest version of the Microsoft database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions.
In the test environment, we engaged two applications, each with different workload patterns running on the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 enterprise class platform. The applications are a TPC-H-like application (acting as a typical DSS application), and a TPC-E-like application (acting as a typical OLTP application).
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition delivers industry-leading performance, scalability, security, and reliability on a choice of clustered or single servers running Windows, Linux, or UNIX. It provides comprehensive features for transaction processing, business intelligence, and content management
applications.
This solution deploys a single OLTP database instance using Oracle Automatic Storage Management.
SAP ERP 6.0, powered by the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, is a fully-integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) application that fulfills the core business needs of midsize companies and large enterprises across all industries and market sectors. SAP ERP 6.0 delivers a comprehensive set of integrated, cross-functional business processes and can serve as a solid business process platform that supports continued growth, innovation, and operational excellence.
SAP IDES (Internet Demonstration and Evaluation System) systems support demos, testing, and functional evaluation based on preconfigured data and clients. IDES contains sample application data for various business scenarios, with business processes that are designed to reflect real-life business requirements and have access to many realistic characteristics. This solution uses IDES to represent a model company for testing purposes, running an Oracle 11g Release 2 database fully virtualized on VMware ESXi5. We provisioned and optimized the architecture according to EMC and SAP recommended practices. For more information, see Appendix A: Detailed application design and LUN layout.
Overview
Microsoft SQL Server
Oracle Database 11g Release 2
SAP ERP and NetWeaver
Table 4 summarizes the profile for each of the four applications deployed in this solution.
Table 4. Application profiles
Application VM configuration DB configuration Workload configuration SAP 3 SAP ERP 6 IDES
EHP 4 instances, 16 vCPUs with 32 GB RAM 1 Oracle DB instance at 845 GB capacity 1,000 LoadRunner Update users + local client copy simulation, 80:20 R/W ratio Oracle OLTP DB instance, 12
vCPUs with 53 GB RAM
1 Oracle DB per virtual machine, 2 TB capacity
SwingBench order entry workload with 400 heavy access users, 60:40 R/W Ratio SQL OLTP 2 SQL instances, 16 vCPUs with 32 GB RAM 1 DB per virtual machine, 1 TB capacity
Mixed workloads to simulate hot, warm applications, 85:15 R/W ratio SQL DSS 1 SQL instance, 32 vCPUs with 128 GB RAM 1 DB per virtual machine, 2 TB capacity 2 concurrent loads, 100% Read
We provisioned and optimized virtual machine resources for load-testing purposes, according to the recommended practices specific to each application.
Storage design for consolidation of applications on VMAX 40K
This section describes the storage configuration and provisioning for this solution and is structured as follows:
• Front-end port usage and zoning • Thin pool configuration
• Application LUN layout • FAST VP policy design
The application workloads were logically separated using masking views within the VMAX 40K and HBAs. Figure 9 shows the front-end port use for each application. Although physically running on the same server as Oracle, SAP is segregated to use different front-end ports and HBAs, using zoning and masking. Both MS SQL OLTP workloads running similar workloads use the same ports and are separated from DSS workloads.
Figure 9. Logical grouping of ports to applications
Overview
Front-end port usage and zoning
EMC Virtual Provisioning greatly simplifies the storage design. Because this
configuration involves remote replication with SRDF, both source and target arrays are configured in exactly the same manner. We created four thin pools on each array, based on the drive types available.
Table 5 shows the thin pool definitions. Table 5. Thin pool configuration
Thin pool name Drive size/ technology/RPM RAID protection No. of drives TDAT size No. of TDAT Pool capacity FLASH_3RAID5 200 GB Flash RAID5 3+1 32 68.8 GB 64 4.2 TB FC10K_RAID1 600 GB FC 10k RAID1 126 66 GB 504 32 TB FC15K_RAID1 450 GB FC 15k RAID1 64 49.2 GB 256 12.2 TB SATA_6RAID6 2 TB SATA 7.2k RAID6 6+2 72 240 GB 256 60 TB
For this solution, the SAP, Oracle, and MS OLTP applications are bound to the
FC10K_RAID1 pool. The MS DSS application is bound to the FC15K_RAID1 pool which is backed by a smaller number of drives.
VMAX administrators can set high-performance policies that use more Flash drive capacity for critical applications, and cost-optimized policies that use more SATA drive capacity for less-critical applications.
The ideal FAST VP policy would be to specify 100 percent for each of the included tiers. Such a policy would provide the greatest amount of flexibility to an associated storage group, as it would allow 100 percent of the storage group’s capacity to be promoted or demoted to any tier within the policy.
In this implementation, we designed the FAST policies to prevent any single
application from consuming high portions of Flash storage to ensure a cost-effective mix of storage with consistently high performance. Conversely, we set the SAP policy to limit SATA usage to ensure minimum levels of performance during periods of low activity.
EMC offers an analysis service for customers to estimate the performance and cost of mixing types of drive technologies (Flash, FC, and SATA) within Symmetrix VMAX storage arrays.
Table 6 shows the FAST VP policies used for the application workloads in this solution for Oracle, SAP, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS.
Thin pool configuration
FAST VP configuration
Table 6. FAST VP policy for Oracle, SAP, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS
Storage group FAST policy name Flash FC SATA
MSSQL1_OLTP MSSQL_OLTP 5% 40% 100% MSSQL2_OLTP MSSQL_OLTP 5% 40% 100% MSSQL_DSS MSSQL_DSS 0% 100% 100%
Oracle Oracle 15% 35% 50%
SAP SAP 10% 80% 10%
The policies set for this solution (as shown in Table 6) are a result of the workload analysis and dynamic tuning to ensure that application workload performed within acceptable performance boundaries. Further tuning for enhanced performance is discussed in FAST VP workload tuning.
The design incorporates the following recommended practices: • Use separate storage volumes for data files and log files • Use separate file groups for large databases
• For ASM, EMC recommends separate ASM disk groups for DATA, REDO, FRA, and TEMP when replicating with SRDF
• Bind all thin devices to the FC tier.
• Log devices and temp files should be pinned to the FC tier
Figure 10 shows an overview of how each critical application is configured for FAST VP. In this implementation, only data LUNs are managed by FAST VP. LUNs for OS and LOG are pinned to the FC tier, excluding them from FAST decisions and movement. For full details of LUN layout and sizing for each application refer to Appendix A: Detailed application design and LUN layout.
Figure 10. General view of FAST VP configuration for mission-critical applications
Storage design considerations for mission-critical database applications with FAST VP
Configuring EMC Symmetrix FAST VP with Unisphere for VMAX
This section outlines the steps for configuring FAST VP on a Symmetrix VMAX array. 1. Enable the FAST controller and set the control parameters.
2. Create the storage tiers. 3. Create the FAST policies.
4. Associate each storage group with the relevant FAST policy and enable FAST VP RDF coordination.
5. Configure performance and move time windows.
To complete these steps, you can use the Unisphere FAST Configuration Wizard, the Unisphere menu commands, or the SYMCLI.
You can access FAST VP settings through the Storage tab in Unisphere under FAST. Figure 11 shows the settings used in the test environment.
Figure 11. FAST VP settings
Note that Allocate by FAST Policy is checked. This ensures that FAST VP will use all tiers for new allocations based on performance and capacity restrictions.
For further information on the control parameters used by FAST VP, see the EMC
Solutions Enabler Symmetrix Array Controls CLI Product Guide.
Overview of FAST VP configuration
Step 1: Enable the FAST controller and set the control parameters
When creating a storage tier, specify the following attributes: • The tier name, which uniquely identifies the storage tier • The disk technology on which the tier will reside
• The RAID protection type for the tier
• The names of the virtual pools that belong to the tier
The solution defines four storage tiers as shown in Figure 12. Unisphere guides administrators through the process of creating the necessary VP tiers. In this solution, four virtual pools reside on the array.
Tiers can be deleted and renamed as required.
Figure 12. Defined storage tiers
Note: When possible, EMC recommends that you configure each FAST VP tier with a single virtual pool, to ensure that all pools within a tier have the same overall performance capabilities. For example, if a tier contains one pool spread over 128 drives and another pool spread over 16 drives, the number of spindles making up the underlying storage will be different for each pool. This could result in unbalanced use of each pool’s performance capabilities.
When creating a FAST policy, specify the following attributes: • The policy name, which uniquely identifies the policy • The name of each tier to be added to the policy
• The upper limit (percent) of each tier that an associated storage group can occupy under the specified policy
Figure 13 shows how to create the FAST policy for this solution, using the FAST Configuration Wizard.
Step 2: Create storage tiers
Step 3: Create FAST policies
Figure 13. Creating a FAST policy
To apply a FAST policy to a schema, associate the schema’s storage group with the FAST policy. Figure 14 shows how to associate the Oracle policy with the Oracle storage group.
Figure 14. Associating a FAST policy with a storage group
Under the Advanced options check Enable FAST VP RDF Coordination. This enables the feature allowing for R1 and R2 to send and receive performance statistics for FAST VP movement for the associated storage group.
Step 4: Associate storage groups with FAST policies and enable RDF coordination
Time windows are used by FAST VP to specify when data can be collected for performance analysis and when data movements can be executed. FAST VP shares monitoring windows with FAST and Symmetrix Optimizer. However, FAST VP requires a separate data movement window.
Performance time windows define the days and times when FAST VP performs analysis. Data movement windows define the days and times when FAST VP moves data between tiers.
EMC recommends that you configure both the monitoring and data movement windows to be always open so that FAST VP can use the most recent analysis and metrics to optimize data placement.
Figure 15 shows the definition of a monitoring window for this solution.
Figure 15. Creating/managing time windows
Note that both source and target arrays were configured with the same FAST VP policies and storage groups.
Table 6 (page 30) shows the FAST policies assigned to the each application.
Step 5: Configure FAST VP
monitoring and move windows
Enginuity 5876 supports cascaded storage groups, which is the ability to nest storage groups within storage groups. A parent storage groups is associated with a masking view, and contains a number of nested child groups.
Cascaded storage groups make it easier to manage ESXi clusters with FAST VP enabled storage. Figure 16 shows the cascaded storage group MSSQL_OLTP_Apps, with three child storage groups, two of which are associated with FAST policies.
Figure 16. Cascaded storage groups
Both the source and target Symmetrix VMAX 40K arrays in this solution have the same number of disks and storage tiers. We created devices and storage groups using the processes described in the previous sections. For continuity, we used the same names for the storage groups and FAST VP policies on the arrays at both sites, and provisioned the DR mount servers that connected to the target array.
All application environments are protected with SRDF. SRDF is configured using the Solutions Enabler command line interface (CLI). The steps used to configure SRDF protection for this configuration are detailed in Appendix B: Configuring Symmetrix remote replication.
Cascaded storage groups
Site protection with SRDF
Performance testing and validation results
This section describes how we tested the applications in our solution environment. Each test is described in more detail in later sections.
Notes: • Benchmark results are highly dependent upon workload, specific application requirements, and system design and implementation. Relative system performance will vary as a result of these and other factors. Therefore, this workload should not be used as a substitute for a specific customer application benchmark when critical capacity planning and/or product evaluation decisions are contemplated.
• All performance data contained in this report was obtained in a rigorously controlled environment. Results obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly.
• EMC Corporation does not warrant or represent that a user can or will achieve similar performance expressed in transactions per minute. To validate the environment, we deployed all applications and populated them with test data. Each of the four applications (SAP, Oracle, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS) was deployed at the production location, Site A, and workloads were driven against each application running simultaneously on the VMAX 40K storage array.
Each application is associated with a FAST policy, and replicates to the remote location, Site B, using SRDF.
We used Unisphere’s Performance Analyzer module to monitor and gather storage performance data in addition to application performance monitoring tools.
The test contains following scenarios:
• End-to-end validation with FAST VP under normal conditions • FAST VP workload tuning
• RDF coordination with continuous production workload • Failover with performance continuity
Overview
Validation
End-to-end validation with FAST VP under normal conditions
The objective of this test was to validate the solution build under normal operating conditions for a normal work day, with FAST VP storage tiering enabled. Each application performs within the defined boundaries, which are the basis for an acceptable service-level agreement.
We evaluated all aspects of the solution, including the VMware vSphere server and virtual machine performance, SAP, Oracle, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS server and client experience, with FAST VP policies applied to each application.
For each application, we used load generation tools to simulate real world user interactions. The details are as follows:
• We used an MSTPCE toolkit on the client virtual machines to generate TPC-E-like loads simultaneously for SQL Server OLTP databases. This emulated warm and hot workloads.
• We used Quest Benchmark Factory to generate a TPC-H-like load for the SQL Server DSS database.
• We generated a SwingBench TPC-C-like order entry workload with 400 users and ran it against the Oracle database.
• For SAP, using four LoadRunner generators, we programmed 1,000 virtual interactive/dialog users to log on to SAP and perform real-life update
transactions simultaneously. Additionally, a test client copy was performed to simulate generation of reports (such as month-end closing).
• LoadRunner produces a constant database write workload by having virtual users perform “update” transactions at a fixed pace. Conversely, the client copy simulation reads several tables of varying sizes simultaneously. Therefore the IOPS workload varies just as much, depending on the set of tables being read in parallel at any given time.
Each of the workloads for the four applications (SAP, Oracle, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS) were run together and stabilized within three hours. We measured each application’s performance to ensure it was within predefined KPIs and that all workloads co-existed without a negative impact on each other.
Figure 17 shows the running workload on the source array for the Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft OLTP applications.
Objectives Application workloads Storage performance overview
Figure 17. Host IOPS as shown in Unisphere for VMAX
The MSSQL DSS workload issued typical online analytical processing queries, one after another. Each query generated a large quantity of table/index scans with an average bandwidth of just over 800 MB/s as shown in Figure 18.
Figure 19 shows a capacity breakdown of each application’s storage by tier. This output from Unisphere FAST demonstrates how each application storage group is spread out on the underlying FAST tiers and whether the storage group is compliant with the policy set.
Figure 19. Capacity breakdown of storage groups under FAST control
Figure 19 shows the usage of each storage group. MSSQL_DSS is spread across the FC and SATA tiers. Oracle, SAP, and MSSQL_OLTP are using capacity from three storage tiers.
You can use Tier Usage reports from Unisphere to monitor tier usage and FAST VP demands to ensure that sufficient capacity exists on the array for more applications. Figure 20 shows the Tier Demand report for the FLASH_3RAID5 tier. The purple triangle shows the maximum demand placed on the tier by FAST VP storage groups, the blue area shows the capacity currently used, and the green area indicates the remaining capacity for future use.
Figure 20. Tier Demand Report for the FLASH_3RAID5 tier
You can configure alerts based on usage thresholds through Unisphere to email or send SNMP traps to administrators if usage reaches the defined thresholds. You can also set up audit level accounts for users who need to monitor storage usage without giving the ability to make changes.
FAST VP capacity use by storage group
Figure 21 shows the number of users who logged on from SAP. LoadRunner generated a user load of 1,000 active users. Users tend to spawn multiple remote (RFC) users as needed, resulting in a higher user count across the servers. Figure 21 shows 1,352 users.
Figure 21. SAP logged-on user sessions
Table 7 shows the different KPIs that were checked to verify SAP stability. Table 7. KPIs for SAP and observed values
Metric Description Ideal value Recorded value
Dialog response time An SAP KPI that measures the total time from when SAP receives a request until a result or output screen is presented to the user.
1,100 ms or less
929.93
User utilization Actual front-end usage. < 50% - 60% 21% System use System/OS usage. < 20% 1% Idle time Unused resources. >20% 78% I/O wait Time when SAP work processes are placed on hold,
waiting for an I/O response; usually an indicator of a hardware issue if neither client copy nor an upgrade is running.
0% - 10% 0%
Wait time Time spent waiting for database response. < 10% of response time
0.04% Heap memory usage The final level of memory that a dialog work process
can consume before it is terminated. Its use indicates a memory bottleneck.
0% 0%
Program/PXA buffer hit ratio
Measure of a buffer’s efficiency by counting how much of the data requested is already loaded on the buffer versus what must still be read from the disk. The higher the value, the more efficient it is.
≥ 95% 99.96%
SAP test result overview
We generated a SwingBench order entry workload with 400 users and ran it against SOE1 schema with FAST VP enabled. The test procedure was carried out with the four application (SAP, Oracle, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS) workloads running together. The performance metrics for 400 users were:
• The Oracle I/O pattern is 8 KB read and 8 KB write, with a read/write ratio of 60/40 percent, respectively.
• 7,656 IOPS, with an average disk read latency of 5.5 ms and a disk write latency of 7 ms.
Table 8, Table 9, Table 10, and Table 11 list the Oracle performance for the test. Table 8. Oracle OLTP performance
Oracle OLTP performance Recorded value
TPM 97,017
SwingBench response time 36 ms Table 9. Oracle storage performance
Storage performance Ideal value Recorded value
IOPS – 7,656
Disk read response time < 10ms 5.5 ms Disk write response time < 10ms 7 ms Table 10. Oracle foreground events
Oracle top 5 timed foreground events Average wait (ms) % DB time DB file sequential read 9 80.05
Log file sync 6 11.80
DB CPU – 5.66
Library cache: mutex X 1 0.09
Read by other session 9 0.07
Table 11. Oracle background wait events
Oracle top timed background events Average wait (ms) % Background time Log file parallel write 3 46.66
Oracle OLTP test results overview
The test results included the following Oracle events:
• DB file sequential read: The session waits while a sequential read from the database is performed. This event is also used for rebuilding the control file, dumping the data file headers, and getting the database file headers.
• Log file parallel write: The writing of redo records to the redo log files from the log buffer.
The acceptable value for average database I/O latency (the Oracle measurement DB file sequential read) is less than or equal to 20 ms. Log file parallel write should be no more than 15 ms. For the test we implemented, with FAST policy in place, both DB file sequential read and log file parallel write (9 ms and 3 ms) exceeded the
acceptable values.
We performed the baseline SQL OLTP performance test with the four application (SAP, ORACLE, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS) workloads running together with FAST VP enabled. A performance baseline was defined to represent the OLTP environment before applying the FAST VP policies as follows:
• This configuration represented the database performance characteristics after FAST VP was enabled and the workload had stabilized.
• Running the simulated user load with this configuration showed that the ESX server had no CPU or memory constraints, and the client application emulated the varying workload.
• The SQL OLTP application I/O pattern is typically 8 KB read/write, with a read/write ratio of 85:15 percent, respectively.
• The SQL Server processed 176,940 transactions per minute and the client processed 47,760 transactions per minute, including TempDB transactions. • The drives supported a workload of 6,802 IOPS in total.
• The average disk latency is less than 20 ms.
• The average CPU use of SQL VM was less than 75 percent. Table 12 lists the performance results for the SQL OLTP load test. Table 12. Performance data with SQL OLTP load
OLTP performance Ideal value Value
Average CPU use (%) SQL01 < 75% 3.5% SQL02 < 75% 15.3% Client transactions per minute SQL01 – 9,240
SQL02 – 38,520
SQL Server transactions per second SQL01 – 37,920 SQL02 – 139,020
SQL OLTP test result overview
OLTP performance Ideal value Value
Average IOPS SQL01 – 1,646
SQL02 – 5,156
OLTP data LUN average latency (milliseconds) (read/write/transfer)
SQL01 < 20ms 9/4/10 SQL02 < 20ms 11/7/11 OLTP log LUN average latency
(milliseconds) (read/write/transfer)
SQL01 < 5ms 0/2/2 SQL02 < 5ms 0/3/3 TempDB data LUN average latency
(milliseconds) (read/write/transfer) SQL01 < 20ms 0/0/0 SQL02 < 20ms 3/0/3 TempDB log LUN average latency
(milliseconds) (read/write/transfer)
SQL01 < 5ms 0/3/3 SQL02 < 5ms 0/3/3
We performed the baseline SQL DSS performance test with the four applications (SAP, ORACLE, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS) workload running together with FAST VP enabled on the Flash, FC, and SATA tiers. We defined a performance baseline to represent the DSS environment after applying the FAST VP policies, which stabilized the workload as follows:
• The SQL DSS I/O pattern is a typical 64k read/write, with a read/write ratio of 100:0 percent for the data LUN.
• The SQL Server TempDB read/write ratio is 1:1.5, with a total of 1,141 IOPS. • The average CPU use of the SQL virtual machine was less than 75 percent. • With a balanced workload, SQL DSS recorded 12,018 IOPS, and the average
bandwidth is at 808 Mb/s with a peak bandwidth of more than 1.1 Gb/s. Table 13 shows the performance data with the SQL DSS workload.
Table 13. Performance data with SQL DSS load
DSS performance Ideal value Value
Average CPU use (%) < 75% 61.0% Average disk bytes/sec (Mb/s) – 808 Maximum disk bytes/sec (Mb/s) – 1,141 DSS data LUN average IOPS – 10,896 TempDB data LUN average IOPS – 1,122
SQL DSS test result overview
The test results indicated the following:
• All four mission-critical applications are able to coexist and perform within service-level agreements.
• Although each application only used a small percentage of Flash storage, we saw high performance levels that FAST VP continued to fine tune to meet the application’s requirements.
• FAST VP data movements are nondisruptive and transparent to all applications.
Summary of results
FAST VP workload tuning validation
It is important to configure FAST VP policies to adapt to changing application workloads. For example, a service provider may have customers who want higher performance levels with minimal impact on other applications.
The purpose of this test is to tune FAST VP policies to meet the changing workloads of SQL OLTP applications and their “on-the-fly” storage group changes. This test
validates how FAST VP rebalances the storage, making dynamic performance improvements as a result of this rebalance.
The initial FAST VP policy for the SQL OLTP storage group is 5 percent Flash, 40 percent FC, and 100 percent SATA. The SQL OLTP storage group contains two child groups—MSSQL1_OLTP and MSSQL2_OLTP. All four applications (SAP, Oracle, SQL OLTP, and SQL DSS) ran at the same time. At 4 a.m., we increased the Flash
percentage for the MSSQL policy to 30 percent. The load generators were left running on all applications and the environment was monitored.
We also changed the FAST policy for the MSSQL_OLTP on the remote array to ensure the same performance impact was seen at the remote site.
We used Unisphere to make the policy change. Figure 22 shows the policy changes in the FAST Policies management GUI.
Figure 22. SQL FAST policy changes
Objectives
After increasing the Flash percentage in the FAST VP policy for SQL OLTP, the other applications (SAP, Oracle and SQL DSS) were unaffected and continued to process their given workloads without interruption.
Figure 23 shows each workload running during the policy change. The dotted line at 7:40 a.m. shows when the SQL OLTP FAST VP policy was changed. 30 minutes later, at 8:10 a.m., FAST VP responded by promoting more hot data to the Flash tier. As a result, the combined host IOPS for both MSSQL1 and MSSQL2 increased from around 7,000 to 12,000, with 71 percent more host I/O at the storage layer.
Figure 23. Effects of tuning FAST VP policy on running workload
Figure 24 shows the SQL performance for the running workloads during FAST VP policy tuning.
Figure 24. SQL performance changes during tuning FAST VP policy on running workloads
Policy tuning results and analysis
Figure 25 shows the combined effects of adjusting the FAST VP policy on the SQL OLTP applications. Both SQL OLTP applications showed improvement on all KPIs.
Figure 25. Performance improvement of MS-SQL environment with FAST policy changes After the policy change and balance, SQL1 processed 176 percent more transactions per minute, almost a 3x improvement, while SQL2 showed an improvement of over 50 percent. Both applications show 60 percent improvement in LUN latency.
After increasing the Flash percentage in the FAST VP policy for SQL OLTP, the other applications (SAP, Oracle, and SQL DSS) remained unaffected and continued to process their given workloads without interruption, as shown in Table 14. Table 14. Application summary
Application Stable and KPIs met? (Before policy change) During policy rebalance Stable and KPIs met? (After policy change) Oracle OLTP Yes No impact Yes
SQL DSS Yes No impact Yes
Figure 26, Figure 27, and Figure 28 show the response times of the OLTP applications at maximum load during the test.
Figure 26. SAP Average Response Time during testing
Figure 26 has three sections: before the FAST VP policy change (red region), during the change (yellow region), and after the change (blue region). The average and normal ranges were based on the red region and plotted as a baseline reference.
Figure 27 shows the Oracle transaction rate. Tuning the SQL OLTP FAST policy on the fly did not have any noticeable impact on the database.
Figure 28. SQL DSS latency (no impact on performance)
The tests shown here indicate the responsiveness of FAST VP in a multi-application environment.
• FAST VP is flexible and enables storage administrators to respond to the demand for increasing service levels by adjusting the mix of storage for an application.
• FAST VP is responsive: Testing showed that within 30 minutes of adjusting the FAST policy, performance increases were realized. Note that we made no changes at the application level during the test.
• We found no negative impact on other running applications as a result of the policy tuning.
Summary of results
RDF coordination with continuous production workload
The RDF coordination test demonstrates the operation of FAST VP with SRDF coordination.
To validate SRDF coordination with FAST VP, we moved all applications to the FC tier on both arrays and completed a full SRDF establish operation to ensure a neutral starting point. To accomplish this, we used VLUN migration, which is a nondisruptive migration of data between storage pools.
We monitored the tier usage of each application storage group and associated LUNs. Figure 29 shows the use of one of the Oracle devices at both R1 and R2 during the rebalance process.
Figure 29 shows the RDF coordination at the LUN level.
Figure 29. FAST VP policy balance of LUN at production and target site
The solid lines represent the tier usage on R1 and the dotted lines represent the storage tiers on R2. At the start, all data resided on FC and FAST policies were
associated with the applications. Figure 29 shows the allocation usage of tiers on R1 and R2 over the rebalance period.
This test shows that capacity is being balanced across this device in a similar manner on both R1 and R2. The placement of R1 and R2 data is made by the FAST VP
controller at both sites, based on the same performance data transferred across the SRDF links. The similar use of all three tiers at both the DR and production sites shows how effective FAST VP is at balancing both sites.
Objectives
RDF coordination overview
