ISILON InsightIQ Appliance - A smart way to get LIVE performance data of ISILON

Hi Friends,

Today I tested the ISILON InsightIQ Appliance for getting the LIVE performance data of my ISILON Cluster. The good thing about this tool is the easy to use and faster deployment !!

You can also do some stress tests on your ISILON and check on the load with InsightIQ. Have a look at the below picture which shows the main page dashboard of your ISILON Cluster with LIVE performance details.

(Click to expand)

My article on calculating IOPS... The much awaited one!

Larger disks would give more capacity that you don’t need and faster disks would provide performance above and beyond what was requested.  This may be good depending on your confidence in the performance requirements.

random I/O
RAID10: write penalty = 2, read = 1; available space = number of disks devided by 2
RAID5: write penalty = 4, read = 1; available space = number of disks minus 1 disk
RAID6: write penalty = 6, read = 1; available space = number of disks minus 2 disks

Always count all the drives involved, since the write penalty takes care of that.

An app does 1000 IOps, where the read / write ratio is 3 / 1, so 3 times as many reads as writes. These 1000 IOps are 750 reads and 250 writes

Backend IOps:
RAID10: 750 + 2 x 250 = 1250; you'll need 1250/180 15k = 7, so at least 8 drives or 1250/130 10k = at least 10 drives
RAID5: 750 + 4 x 250 = 1750; you'll need 1750/180 15k = at least 10 drives or 1750/130 10k = at least 14 drives
RAID6: 750 + 6 x 250 = 2250; you'll need 2250/180 15k = at least 13 drives or 2250/130 10k = at least 18 drives

Not digested ???


Let me take it this way now...

As for the IOPS per drive here is what is used as industry standard:

FC 10K= 150 IOPS 
FC 15K= 200 IOPS 
SSD = 400 IOPS 
SATA = 80 IOPS 
Flash: 3500 IOPS
SAS 15k: 180 IOPS
NLSAS: 90 IOPS

These are just rules of thumb used to size environments. 

Manually registering a host into VNX Storage - Abstract EMC Forum

https://community.emc.com/thread/194551

Click to expand...

IBM XIV: Phasing Out and Phasing In a component

When a part is failed in a XIV system, the part is marked as phased out.

This command instructs the system to stop using the component, where the component can be either a disk, module, switch or UPS.

For disks, the system starts a process for copying the disk’s data, so that even without this disk, the system is redundant. The state of the disk after the command is Phasing-out.

The same process applies for data modules. The system starts a process for copying all the data in the module, so that the system is redundant even without this module. A data module phase-out causes a phase-out for all the disks in that module.

For UPSs and switches, the system configures itself to work without the component. There is no phase-out for power supplies, SFPs or batteries.

Phasing out a module or a disk, if it results in the system becoming non-redundant, is not permitted. Components must be in either OK or a Phase In status.

Once the phase-out process is completed, the component's state is either Fail or Ready, depending on the argument markasfailed. If true, the phased-out component is marked as a failed component (in order to replace the component). If false, the phased-out component is in the Ready state.

component_phaseout component=ComponentId [ markasfailed=<yes|no> ]

Phasing In:
This command instructs the system to phase in a component. Components are used by the system immediately. For disk and data modules, a process for copying data to the components (redistribution) begins. Components must be in Ready or Phasing Out states. There is no phase-in for power supplies, SFPs or batteries.

component_phasein component=ComponentId

VMAX: Newly created datadevs not immediately available for allocations ???

There is a background process PHCO/IVTOC that runs on the new devices and before that process is finished, they are not available for allocations.

There is a fix# 68779 available for 5876.268.174  that will give high priority for PHCO over normal IVTOC.

PHCO  is mainly a security feature introduced in 5876.229 that will make the ucode run a scan on all newly added TDATs to check if they degraded due to a disk failure in the RAID group or so. DAs should scan the devices and once the scan is complete, It clears the PHCO flag and then devices will be eligable for new extents allocation.

To be honest with you, The scan takes some time. There is a way to disable it (Senior PSE is needed for this) but ususally PSE lab discourages doing so, however after adding the fix mentioned above, PHCO is giving very high priority so the scan should take less time.

Hope this helps!

Cisco SMART Zoning - Yes it is Smart enough !

Smart Zoning is pretty awesome and I highly recommend it to anyone. The basic idea is that you will create a smart zone as various types. In my example i'm going with a 15 host ESX environment called ESXProd connect to two fabrics, A and B on separate HBA ports. Each fabric has two VMAX FA ports shared by the ESX hosts.  Using traditional 1-to-1 zoning each host would have something like this:

ESX1_HBA1_7e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA1_9e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA2_8e1 VSAN 2
ESX1_HBA2_10e1 VSAN 2

Each zone contains two member pwwn - one for the server's HBA and one for the FA Port. All in i'd have 60 zones (4 zones times 15 hosts) to manage and deal with.

Using a one-to-many SmartZone we allow a single initiator to connect to multiple targets.  That means my zoning per server is now:

ESX1_HBA1_7e1_9e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA2_8e1_10e1 VSAN 2

Each zone has three pwwn - one for the server's HBA, and two for the FA Ports. It's a lot less zones than the traditional approach,  but it's still 30 zones in all. I think the better option is the many-to-one SmartCone which allows multiple initiators to talk to a single target. sing this we end up with far less zones, like this:

ESXProd_7e1 VSAN 1
ESXProd_9e1 VSAN 1
ESXProd_8e1 VSAN 2
ESXProd_10e1 VSAN 2

Each SmartConnect zone contains 16 pwwn.  15 for server HBA WWNs and 1 for the FA WWN.  Total zones used?  Four.  When adding a new ESX host to this cluster we simple modify the SmartZone to add a new member pwwn.

The third option,  which Cisco does not recommend but does work is many-to-many.  We'd end up with two zones, one per fabric.

You can zone using device alias, pwwn, fcid, or fc alias as members in SmartZones. Enable SmartZone at the fabric, zone, or zoneset level..

When you add a member it's just like the current syntax except you have to specify it as either init, target, or both:

member pwwn 10:00:00:12:134:56:99 target

Zoning then will only allow initiators to talk to targets and not other initiators.

Enabling Smart Zoning is as simple as  "zone smart-zoning enable vsan 100".   Then you have to convert your existing zones... you can do it per zone, vsan, zonetset, or fc alias like so: "zone convert smart-zoning zone name <name> vsan <n>" or "zone convert smart-zoning vsan <n>"


If, for whatever reason, you need an target to talk to a target or init to init you just disable Smart Zoning on that zone: "no attribute disable-smart-zoning" inside that zone..

VPLEX Best Practices Document - Release: November 2013

Hello Friends,


Here you can download the EMC VPLEX Planning and Best Practices Document.


All rights reserved for EMC. No un-authorized copying or editing. If you want to download the copy, you can login to support.emc.com and use your customer login to download