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Taking vSphere to the Next Level with Converged Infrastructure Greg Smith - Sr. Director Technical Marketing, Nutanix James Yun - Manager of Datacenter Operations, Practice Fusion . Complex configuration Specialized, domain-specific skill sets No resource elasticity .
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Taking vSphere to the Next Level with Converged Infrastructure Greg Smith- Sr. Director Technical Marketing, Nutanix James Yun - Manager of Datacenter Operations, Practice Fusion
Complex configuration • Specialized, domain-specific skill sets • No resource elasticity
Engineered for Performance? SAN/NAS Storage Network Centralized Storage
Identifying Complexity and Bottlenecks • Complex to manage • Costly to scale SAN/NAS Storage Network • Managed separately from virtualization • Difficult to provision • Performance bottleneck Centralized Storage
Converged Infrastructure Server 1 Server 2 Server N Virtual Machine/Virtual Disk Virtualized Control Logic Flash Flash Flash Scale-out architecture + commodity hardware high performance Design for failure - ensures resilience and data protection
Software-defined Storage • Pure scale-out and shared nothing architecture • Storage control is 100% software-based and provisioned on-demand • All data management functionality is ‘late binding’, not factory defined • Unit of storage management is a VM, not LUN or volume
Eliminating Overhead of Storage Management • Request LUN creation on SAN • Define LUN on top of a particular RAID group • SAN team ensures LUN is appropriately zoned and masked • Virtualization admin scans for new LUNs on each ESXihost • Virtualization admin adds new LUN and formats with VMFS into VMFS-datastore • SAN admin monitors for SAN capacity utilization and hot spots 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 Typical Data Center Software-defined Storage Provisioning and Management
How do scale-out architectures work in a vSphere infrastructure?
Write I/O for ESXi Workloads • Data is written locally • Replicated on other nodes for high availability • Replicas are spread across cluster for high performance Node Node Node Guest VM Controller VM Controller VM Controller VM Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor Storage Storage Storage
Read I/O for ESXi Workloads • Data is read locally • Remote access only if data is not locally present Node Node Node Guest VM Controller VM Controller VM Controller VM Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor Storage Storage Storage
Support for vMotionand DRS • Metadata service can access data from anywhere • Locality improves over time Node Guest VM Node Node Controller VM Controller VM Controller VM Hypervisor Storage Hypervisor Hypervisor Storage Storage Return
High Availability • Metadata service can access replicas from anywhere • New copies are created to ensure continued fault tolerance Guest VM Node Node Node Guest VM Controller VM Controller VM Controller VM Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervior Storage Storage Storage Return
Improving Infrastructure Consume-ability Rack-level Modularity Appliance-based Modularity Networking Storage Servers Virtualization Networking, Servers, Storage, Virtualization
Free, web-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR) • Fastest growing EMR platform in the U.S. • 150,000 physicians • 65 million patient records • Based in San Francisco
Earlier Infrastructure Mostly on premise • 90% virtualized • Traditional SAN / Compute • Windows/Linux • Diverse technology stack Doing more with less • Maximize hardware investments • High degree of utilization
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Mixed use SAN • Database, VM, FILE On-going performance tuning • Balance SP port usage to avoid queue full conditions • Balance SP utilization • Maximize efficiency and write cache utilization • Manage storage pools • Capacity/Performance Latency Spikes • Needed to offload IOPS to another platform
Why We Chose a Converged Solution Storage + server in a single platform • Storage includes both HDD and flash Time to full POC Nutanix • Setup in a few hours • ESXi pre-installed • 30 days from drop ship to testing complete Need vSphere support • DRS and HA Currently in serving 50% of our PRD Web + App Performance • Excelled in random workloads • 5X improvement in read latency. From 5ms to < 1ms
Agility Scale – Time to provision Applications (VMs) • Minutes/Hours Compute layer • Several weeks to order new blade or server Storage layer • Planning, design could take months • Migration could take weeks on top of that
Agility advantages Scale out compute / storage at the same time • Capacity planning is much easier • Time to procure storage drops significantly • Easier to budget Converged computing • Portability between our sites
Lessons Learned Understand the performance profiles of your VMs • Match the workload to the right hardware Choose solutions that reduce TCO and maximize agility • Long term planning is difficult, stay nimble.
Thank You NUTANIX INC. – CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY