Block Storage Provisioning and Management

Upon completion of this module, you should be able to:

• Describe configuration guidelines for provisioning storage
• Configure and manage storage objects

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 Block Storage Provisioning and Management

Lesson 1: VNX Storage Objects

This lesson covers the following topics:
• General considerations
• Storage Pools and RAID Groups
• LUNs

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General Considerations for Configuring Storage
• Drive types
 Drives selection should be based upon the expected workload
 FLASH for extreme performance
 SAS for general performance
 NL-SAS for streaming, aging data and archives, and backups
• RAID levels
 Match the appropriate RAID level with the expected workload
 RAID 1/0 for heavy transactional random writes (> 25%)
 RAID 5 for medium-high performance, general workloads, and
sequential I/O
 RAID 6 for NL-SAS read-based workloads and archives

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Pool vs. RAID Group
Pool Example RAID Group Examples

Extreme Performance Tier (SSD) RAID 1/0: (4+4)

RAID 1/0: (4+4) RAID Group 0

RAID 5: (4+1)
RAID Group 1
Performance Tier (SAS)
RAID 5: (8+1)
RAID 5: (8+1) RAID 5: (8+1)

RAID Group 2

RAID 6: (6+2)

RAID Group 3
Capacity Tier (NL-SAS)

RAID 6: (14+2) RAID 6: (14+2)

RAID Group 4

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Pool Considerations

Pools can contain a few or hundreds of disks

• Spreads workloads over many resources
• Can contain a single drive type (homogeneous) or multiple drive types
(heterogeneous)
• Building blocks for FAST VP operations
RAID Configuration is moved from the pool level to the tier level
• Users can select RAID protection by tier
• Mixed RAID types supported within a Pool
• Once the tier is created, the RAID Configuration for that tier in that pool
cannot change
Multi-Pool Support
• Separate workloads for different I/O profiles
• Dedicate resources for performance goals

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RAID Group Considerations

• Limited to a single drive type and a

Drive count maximum of 16 drives per RAID group

• Drives can be selected from the same bus

Drive location (horizontal) or different busses (vertical)
• Best practice is to use horizontal selection

• Used on 4 +1 RAID 5 groups when the

Large element predominant workload is large-block
size random read activity

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Thick LUNs

Capacity of a thick LUN, is distributed

equally across the disks in the pool

Capacity of a thick LUN, same as the user

capacity seen by the server

• Full capacity allocated at time of creation

Uses slightly more capacity than user data

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Thin LUNs

Capacity visible to the server is independent of

the available physical storage in the pool

Competes with other LUNs in the pool for the

pool’s available storage

A thin LUN can run out of disk space if the pool

to which it belongs runs out of disk space

A thin LUN uses slightly more capacity than the

amount of user data written to it due to the
metadata

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Classic LUNs

Created on RAID Groups

All space allocated at creation time

• LBAs are physically contiguous

Predictable performance and data layout

Support active-active host access

• Simultaneous access through SPA and SPB

• Trespassing of LUNs no longer required

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 Block Storage Provisioning and Management

Lesson 1: Summary
During this lesson the following topics were covered:
• General considerations
• Storage Pools and RAID Groups
• LUNs

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 Block Storage Provisioning and
Management

Lesson 2: Managing Storage Objects

This lesson covers the following topics:
• Creating Storage Pools
• Creating LUNs
• Displaying and monitoring storage objects

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Provisioning Storage with Unisphere

The Pools tab is selected by default

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Creating a Storage Pool

Multiple combo boxes

will be shown for the
level of performance
that can be achieved
with the installed disk
types

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Creating a Pool LUN

Thin LUNs are created by

default. To create a Thick
LUN uncheck the Thin
box.

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Displaying Pool Properties (General Tab)

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Displaying Pool Properties (Disks Tab)

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Displaying Pool Properties (Advanced Tab)

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Displaying Pool Properties (Tiering Tab)

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Displaying Pool LUN Properties (General Tab)

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Displaying Pool LUN Properties

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Creating a Storage Pool: RAID Group (General Tab)

Users have the option to

manually select the
disks for the RAID
Group

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Creating a Storage Pool: RAID Group (Advanced
Tab)

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Creating a RAID Group LUN (General Tab)

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Creating a RAID Group LUN (Advanced Tab)

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Displaying RAID Group Properties

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Displaying RAID Group LUN Properties (General
Tab)

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Displaying RAID Group LUN Properties

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 Block Storage Provisioning and
Management

Lesson 2: Summary
During this lesson the following topics were covered:
• Creating Storage Pools
• Creating LUNs
• Displaying and monitoring VNX storage

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Summary
Key points covered in this module:
• Described characteristics of VNX storage objects such as pools,
LUNs, disks, and RAID Groups.
• Considerations for employing the different storage object
options
• Both thick and thin LUNs can share the same pool
• Steps to create Pool and RAID Group storage pools, and thin and
thick LUNs from these pools.

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