Configure Windows to Read/Write Shared SAN

The key to a good VMWare storage platform is understanding what kind of load VMWare generates.

• First, since you host a lot of servers, the workload is typically random. There are many IO streams going at the same time, and not many of them can be successfully pre-cached.
• Second, it's variable. During normal operations, you may see 70% random reads, however the instant you decide to move a VM to a new datastore or something, you'll see a massive 60GB sequential write. If you're not careful about architecture, this can cripple your storage's ability to handle normal IO.
• Third, a small portion of your environment will usually generate a large portion of the storage workload.

The best way to approach building storage for a VMWare platform is to start with the fundamentals.

• You need the ability to service a large random read workload, which means smaller faster drives, as well as possibly SSD. Most modern storage systems allow you to move data around automatically depending on how it's accessed. If you are going to use SSD, you want to ensure this is how you use it. It should be there as a way of gradually reducing hot-spots. Whether you use SSD or not, it's beneficial to be able to put all the work across all the drives, so something with a type of storage pooling would be beneficial.
• You need the ability to service intermittent large writes, which doesn't care as much about the spindle speed of the underlying drives, but does care about the controller stack's efficiency and the size of the cache. If you have mirrored caching (which is not optional unless you're willing to go back to backups whenever you have a controller failure), the bandwidth between the two caches used for mirroring will be your bottleneck for large sequential writes, usually. Ensure that whatever you get has a high speed controller (or cluster) interconnect for write caching. Do your best to get a high speed front end network with as many ports as you can get while remaining realistic on price. The key to good front end performance is to put your storage load across as many front end resources as possible.
• You can seriously reduce costs by having a tier for low priority storage, as well as thin provisioning. If your system isn't automatically migrating individual blocks to cheap large/slow drives (like nearline SAS or SATA with 7200 RPM and 2TB+ sizes), try to do it manually. Large slow drives are excellent targets for archives, backups, some file systems, and even servers with low usage.
• Insist that the storage is VAAI integrated so that VMWare can de-allocate unused parts of the VMs as well as the datastores.

If this P2000 is anything like my old MSA4400, then vDisks are volumes that are assigned to servers as LUNs, but under the covers, what is happening on the HP has little in common with a Clariion.

The way I remember it, the HP has a bunch of disks that it sets up in fixed groups (with RAID, I think), and then vDisks are created that live on these disks with their own virtual raid. So you could have one vDisk with virtually raid 10, meaning each block or chunk that comprised the vDisk would be saved twice, and another one with virtually raid 5, meaning that the chunks would get saved once, but would have distributed parity.

I'm a little hazy on the details about the actual disks, whether there was raid under all these vDisks or just a JBOD. I do remember that we had global spares, because we had several dozen disks of about 100 fail over the course of three weeks, and the system was able to take the hits until more than 9 were rebuilding at the same time.

Maybe someone with more recent and specific P2000 experience can chime in here and help, but this is what I remember.