Rapid Cloning Utility now checks the partition alignment
Yesterday I was playing around a little bit with the new NetApp Virtual Storage Console 2.1.1 which was released last week. I wanted to create a couple of clones (actually 100), and I got an error message. I didn’t realized as a big thing, then I forgot it as my phone was ringing… But wait, it’s something new. So let’s see the error message:
VSC 2.1.1 for vSphere 5 is out
vSphere 5 has been released a few weeks ago and now you can download the Virtual Storage Console to monitor, clone, provision and backup, using NetApp storage. VSC is available on NOW at no cost. The most important change is it supports vSphere 5. It is also compatible with VMware View 4.6 and 5 as well as Citrix XenDesktop 5.0.
You can download and see the full list of changes on the NOW page.
Documentation:
- Release notes
- Installation and Administration Guide
- Provisioning and Cloning Administration Guide
- Backup and Recovery Administration Guide
I’ll test the old and new features in the near future, and post my experiences here.
yet another Rapid Cloning post
There was a test already here about NetApp Rapid Cloning Utility, but in that case I compared the clone by vSphere and the clone by the array. The other difference is in that case the Virtual Machine were running. This time I tested the behavior of RCU on different types of Volumes/DataStores. About the license requirement:
The rapid cloning capabilities provided by the Provisioning and Cloning feature require a NetApp FlexClone license on the storage array where clones are being created. Read more…
VMworld session voting is open, a late announcement
So many bloggers filed a lot of posts about VMworld session voting. I’m late with this, but still there’s a little time to vote. I’ve checked the session list several times, started from the top and started from the bottom also. There’s no chance to read everything, I think it’s not possible, at least for me. We are getting closer to the end of the voting time and I have to say, I have a session proposal there. Read more…
NetApp Flash Cache test in VMware environment
NetApp Insight was my first experience with Flash Cache in action. It was actually a video presentation, but the cool factor was pretty high. Fun starts at 2:35 when 1000VM starts to boot
NetApp FAS3210 VMware VAAI performance test
In the previous posts here and here I’ve already tested the Data ONTAP 8.0.1 VAAI capabilities with a FAS2040 controller. This week we were fortunate enough to test a brand new FAS3210 system, and I repeated the VAAI tests to see the differences. Of course I know the new 3200 and the 2000 series are not the same category, but I wanted to see how much faster and what’s the difference between the VAAI and non-VAAI operations.
I have the same piece of HW:
- Cisco UCS B200 blade system with two X5550 sockets and 48GB of RAM
- Cisco Nexus 5010 with 4Gb FC connection to the NetApp box
New storage box:
- NetApp FAS3210 with 24×300 SAS 15krpm disks. For this test I’ve created the same aggregate of 9 disks.
vSphere clone vs. NetApp rapid clone
In a typical NetApp & vSphere environment there are two well-known options to create a clone of a Virtual Machine. The first one is the vSphere default and the second is the NetApp rapid clone. The vSphere default clone is a simple copy operation from filesystem point of view, so if you browse the datastore you’ll see the same files in the source and target VM’s directory, except for the log files. The NetApp rapid cloning utility is doing the things in an other way, we’ll see how. But first of all, let’s talk about the configuration.
- NetApp FAS2040, 500GB NFS datastore (standard 1Gbit onboard port)
- vSphere 4.1 with NetApp Virtual Storage Console 2.0.1
- Windows 2008R2 VM, contains a ~7GB VMDK
NetApp VMware VAAI performance test, part II: iSCSI
Few days ago I posted some performance test results with VMware vStorage API for Array Integration. I went through the test again, but insted of Fibre Channel I have iSCSI today.
I have the same piece of HW except for the connection:
- Cisco UCS B200 blade system with two X5550 sockets and 48GB of RAM
- NetApp FAS2040 with 12×300 FC 15krpm disks. For this test I’ve created an aggregate of 9 disks.
In the last test I had 4Gb Fibre Channel connection and now I have simple 1Gb iSCSI. I repeated the same steps, the only difference is the size of the VMDK I’ve added to the Virtual Machine: Read more…
NetApp VMware VAAI performance test
I usually do my Data ONTAP tests with the simulator as I don’t have NetApp hardware in my lab. Last week we got a NetApp FAS2040 system for two weeks and I decided to make some VAAI tests.
About the configuration:
- Cisco UCS B200 blade system with two X5550 sockets and 48GB of RAM
- NetApp FAS2040 with 12×300 FC 15krpm disks. For this test I’ve created an aggregate of 9 disks.
- Cisco Nexus 5010 with 4Gb FC connection to the NetApp box
I went throught the same steps with VAAI enabled and disabled configurations. At the beginning I had a Windows VM with 40GB hard disk.
- add a new Hard Disk to the VM, 100GB, thick, cluster supported (zeroed)
- clone the VM (with the added disk) within the same LUN
- clone the VM to another LUN
- Storage VMotion the VM Read more…
VSC and SMVI, remote replication (part III)
In the first two posts of this series (here and here) we saw the Virtual Storage Console and the SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure and how they integrate together. In this part I try to show what happens to the snapshots if the volume is replicated to a remote site. For remote replication NetApp has a very efficient tool, called SnapMirror. SnapMirror works pretty well with Flexible Volumes, Thin Provisioning, and of course with deduplication. SnapMirror today has compression support, and these things together helps to reduce bandwidth utilization.
SnapMirror is quite easy, a lot of blog and howto posts are available and of course the official documentation. I don’t take care of the SnapMirror setup in this post, I assume it’s OK. At this point I have a source volume (srmvol) and a destination volume (srmvolsm) which are in sync. Deduplication and compression are enabled.
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