As my regular readers know (and there’s more of them than I thought), I’m a fan of VSAs and have been playing with them at home. I’ve just built myself a test-rig for playing with such things; a pair of machines running AMD5000+, 4 gigs of memory, GBe and booting to ESXi off USB flash-drives. I’m planning for a third box which will be the main storage server for them but I need to find a VSA which I am happy with to run as the main storage.
So at the moment, I’m just installing VSAs under VMware workstation (on Windows 7) and experimenting. Seeing what works well and what doesn’t. I’m already noticing some differences and I’m wondering if it would be worthwhile doing a more in-depth review/test. I am thinking about reviewing on the following criteria:
1) Ease of Installation: How much fiddling do I have to do to get the VSA up and running? Do I need a manual? Is it intuitive?
2) Ease of Use: How easy is it to configure once up and running?
3) Features: What is the feature set like? Also is it capacity constrained?
4) Footprint: How much resource does it require/consume?
5) Performance: this is the most contentious, how do you bench a bunch of completely different products in a fair manner? Also do the ELAs allow the simulators to be benched?
Anyway, the approach I’m going to take is to take the bog-standard download and install it; no tuning. For those simulators/appliances which require a host operating system such as the NetApp simulator; I’ll probably use Ubuntu.
If I can get ESXi to recognise the SATA controller on the real test rigs; I’ll use them, I have spare disks which I can hang off them. Otherwise, I’ll build a new clean Windows image and run them all under Workstation.
For benchmarking, I’ll probably use iozone but if people have other suggestions; please shout. I draw the line at running any of the Spec benchmarks mind you.
I’m not sure how long this process will take, so you’ll have to be patient; it’s a spare time project. And if you have any appliances that you want me to test, a link to them in the comments would be useful. Also, if anyone has any objections to me benchmarking performance of their appliances, please contact me.
Sto-bod, check with Mr Whyte about the modified (for IO) VMMark benchmark. Brian Garrett at ESG is another source.
If it turns that its not too convoluted, you might even be able to watch that chef show, read some stories and fry a couple blintzes on an array of overclocked CPUs at the same time.
Hi Martin,
This is Chhandomay from Sun Microsystems (chhandomay dot mandal at sun dot com). I wanted to touch base with you to see whether you might be interested in reviewing storage products like Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems: http://www.sun.com/amberroad
We can discuss this in details once we connect.
Thanks,
Chhandomay
im not quite sure you have enough allocation from the local grid to start demoing the 7000 kit 🙂
Martin,
Just looking at VDBench for benchmarking right now – seems to be interesting and is still supported (unlike IOMeter) which might be interesting to compare to IOZone?
Would be very interested in the set of profiles & attributes you decide upon (I’ve emailed ESG 3 times in last 2 mths re Brian’s SNWE presentation on IOMeter and never got a response!) as this is where the ‘art’ of FUDmarketing can get hidden…
Oh and of course a nice clean web site to host all the different VSA images would be good 🙂
Try the Lefthand VSA, doddle to setup and if you resize the VSA LUN before boot and setup you should be good to go.
http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/home.aspx