Tag Archives: Nutanix

Heterogeneous Nutanix Clusters Advantages & Considerations

Posted on by
1

Lets start with a simple example, the below shows a 4 node cluster mixing 2 x NX-3060 nodes with 2 x NX-8035 nodes. Both node types share the same Haswell CPU types but the NX-3060 has ~2TB usable and the NX-8035 has ~8TB usable.

3060and8035Mixed

Assuming the cluster capacity was 50% utilized the NDSF layer would look similar to this:

3060and8035cluster50percentused

The above shows the NDSF having a total Storage Pool capacity of 20TB with 50% used (10TB). As we have a heterogenous cluster, we have 2 different node types with vastly different usable capacity.

Nutanix Disk Balancing automatically balances the storage to ensure the utilization percentage of all SSDs/HDDs within the cluster are within +-15%. This means administrators do not have to worry about capacity management on a per node basis, capacity management only needs to be performed at the storage pool (cluster) layer.

Advantage 1: No silos of storage capacity is heterogeneous environments

Advantage 2: NDSF disk balancing ensures the data is evenly distributed throughout the cluster

Advantage 3: There is no requirement for hypervisor level storage capacity management such as Storage DRS (SDRS).

For more information on why Storage DRS is not required see: Storage DRS and Nutanix – To use, or not to use, that is the question?

In a heterogeneous environment, it is likely you will have multiple workloads with different capacity and performance requirements. The below diagram shows the same 4 node cluster, with a single storage pool and 4 containers with different data protection and reduction settings to suit a wide range of application requirements.

Note: The RF3 container shown below would only be possible in clusters of 5 nodes or more, but is shown to illustrate the flexibility/capabilities of NDSF.

HetroClusterCapacity

The storage pool itself has up to 20TB usable (assuming RF2 and excluding data reduction savings). In the Pool we can see four Containers which can be thought of as policies which can be applied to Virtual Machines or Virtual Disks.

Container01 is configured with RF2 and In-Line compression and reports 10TB free space as the underlying storage pool (where capacity is managed) is 50% utilised. Therefore the Container reports free space as all the available capacity within the Storage Pool based on its configured RF.

Container02 has RF2, In-Line compression and EC-X enabled but you will note it also reports 10Tb free space, as capacity is not assigned to a container, its shared between all containers within a Storage Pool.

Container03 is configured with a RF3 which is different to Containers 01 and 02, as such the container reports free space based on its configured RF of 3, so it shows 13.3TB usable and 6.66Tb free space as that is the maximum data that can be supported in that container based on its storage policies.

Container04 reports the same free space as Container 01 and 02, as its configured with the same RF. While Container04 has all data reduction technologies enabled, the Container reports actual free space, as data reduction takes effect the usable capacity will change.

It is possible to set capacity reservations on Containers where an application or tenant requires a guarantee as to the usable capacity available, it is also possible to set limits on containers to prevent workloads using more than a specified amount of capacity. However, for most use cases, I recommend not using Reservations or Limits and simply manage capacity at the Storage Pool layer.

Nutanix also supports VMs with more assigned/used capacity than the node they are running on, for more information see: What if my VMs storage exceeds the capacity of a Nutanix node?

Regardless of what node type/s reside within a Nutanix cluster, there is no advanced settings required to be configured such as Queue Depths, VAAI and multi-pathing, which can be required when mixing legacy storage platforms in the same cluster. There is also no requirement for Storage DRS to manage either performance or capacity as discussed earlier.

Advantage 3: No silos of storage capacity, all capacity is shared in the storage pool

Advantage 4: Storage policies such as RF and Data Reduction can be changed on the fly as required and multiple policies are supported within the same cluster.

For more information about Nutanix data reduction technologies, see: Nutanix Implementation of Data Avoidance & Reduction Technologies

Regardless of the mixture of node types and their respective capacity/performance characteristics, there is no advanced configuration required to achieve optimal performance.

Nutanix automatically manages I/O pathing and as data locality ensures most data is read locally and writes are always written local to the VM and then replicas distributed throughout the cluster, it minimizes the chances of hot spots by default.

In the unlikely event one nodes local SSD tier becomes saturated, NDSF will automatically write data across the shared SSD tier until the local nodes SSD tier has sufficient capacity to resume local writes. This avoids the requirement for a storage admin to take any corrective actions.

Advantage 5: In the unlikely event of saturation of a nodes SSD tier, NDSF automatically redirects new I/O until ILM (tiering) can free up capacity within the local tier.

NDSF natively distributes writes throughout all nodes within the cluster. This means all nodes within heterogeneous clusters increase the capacity, performance and resiliency of the entire cluster.

To increase the performance of a single VM, you have numerous options. All you need to do is migrate (vMotion for ESXi, Live Migration for Hyper-V or Migrate for AHV) to a node with higher spec physical processors, more SSD drives and/or more SATA spindles.

There is no requirement to Storage vMotion, or relocate the VM to a new Datastore/Container. NDSF manages the storage layer automatically and will localize hot data if/when required.

Advantage 6: No silos of storage capacity, all capacity is shared in the storage pool

Advantage 7: All nodes contribute to the capacity, performance and resiliency of the cluster

Heterogeneous clusters are managed by a single HTML 5 GUI called PRISM. There is no need to access multiple management interfaces for different storage types.

Advantage 8: Heterogeneous clusters are managed via a single HTML 5 GUI.

Nutanix also supports Pin to SSD which allows workloads requiring all flash to reside within a hybrid (SSD+SATA) cluster and be guaranteed all flash performance.

VMs or Virtual Disks can also be marked to be stored solely in Flash on the fly if/when required and vice versa.

Advantage 9: No silos required for workloads requiring All Flash performance

Nutanix eliminates the complexity around managing performance at a datastore layer. Nutanix supports up to the chosen hypervisors limits, e.g.: vSphere HA limit is 2048 VMs per datastore. As all controllers within a cluster actively service all datastores (Containers), performance isn’t constrained at a datastore layer like with traditional storage products.

For more information see: Unlimited VMs per datastore? Its not a myth with Nutanix!

Advantage 10: No performance concerns/constraints at the datastore level

What about Considerations for Heterogeneous Clusters?

From a performance perspective, always ensure you size to have your N+x (e.g.: N+1 , N+2 etc) node/s sized >= the largest node in the cluster to ensure in the event of a node failure, workloads benefiting from higher performance nodes can failover to equivalent nodes.

From a capacity perspective, for NDSF to be able to restore the configured RF (RF2 or RF3) in the event of a node failure, sufficient capacity must exist within the storage pool. As such, when using high capacity nodes such as NX-8035s , NX-8150s or NX-6035C storage only nodes, ensure you have >= capacity of the largest node free within the storage pool.

Advantage 11: Performance and availability sizing for heterogeneous clusters is simple.

Another consideration is for mission-critical or high I/O applications, spread these evenly across the nodes and ideally ensure the active working set fits within the local SSD tier. Doing so will maximise performance, but in the event a very large workload cannot fit with the local SSD, its data will resided within the shared SSD tier and be actively serviced by multiple Controller VMs.

For more information about sizing see:  Rule of Thumb: Sizing for Storage Performance in the new world.

Advantage 12: The NDSF shared SSD tier ensures in the event a workload exceeds the local SSD capacity that the application still enjoys all flash performance by distributing data intelligently across the cluster.

Over time, when adding new nodes, VMs can be quickly/easily migrated to newer, higher performance/capacity nodes without any preparation. The VMs will immediately benefit from the newer nodes CPU,RAM and storage performance even if most of its data is still stored on older node types.

Older nodes can be non disruptively removed once they are end of life, again without any preparation or administrator intevenston.

Advantage 13: Workloads on NDSF benefit from newer generation nodes immediately without complex design/migration activities.

Summary:

  • Nutanix supports and recommends heterogeneous clusters
  • No complexity with multi-pathing, it’s optimal out of the box
  • No custom per datastore configuration
  • VAAI just works, no advanced configuration required due to mixed node types
  • No compromise required to mix node types
  • No silos of storage capacity, all capacity is shared in the storage pool
  • All nodes contribute to performance of the cluster
  • No balancing VMs across datastores/storage devices is required to improve performance/resiliency
  • NDSF disk balancing ensures the data is evenly distributed throughout the cluster helping avoid hotspots
  • The distribution of RF traffic throughout the cluster also helps avoid hotspots
  • No silos required for workloads requiring all flash performance
  • NDSF ensures VMs can immediately benefit from the addition of newer generation node types
  • Nodes can be added/removed without system administrator performing data migrations

Peak performance vs Real World – Exchange on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)

Posted on by
3

I wrote a post in April 2015 titled “Peak Performance vs Real World Performance” which discusses how benchmarks are not realistic and the performance shown in benchmarks can rarely be reproduced with real workloads. It has been one of my most popular posts, and I have had overwhelmingly positive feedback, with only a select few still pushing unrealistic peak performance benchmarks as being of value to customers.

I thought I would whip up a post showing an example of benchmarks vs real world performance requirements using MS Exchange Jetstress on Nutanix.

The below is a screen shot from Nutanix PRISM HTML based GUI showing a Virtual Machines Read/Write IOPS , bandwidth and latency during a MS Exchange Jetstress benchmark.

JetstressAHV20160105

The screen shot shows ~4000 Read IOPS and ~4000 Write IOPS at a latency of 1.59ms.

But what does the above really tell us and what does it mean to a customer?

I’ve been quoted as saying “Benchmarks are of little value without context specific to customer requirements!” and I stand by this statement.

Let’s now look at an example of a real customers requirement:

The below is from the Exchange server role requirements calculator and it is a screen shot from the Role requirements tab which shows an estimate of the IOPS required for the Databases and Logs for a single Exchange instance.

ExchangeIOexample

It shows the required IOPS being 536 for the databases and 115 for the logs.

Note: The sizing calculator was for an environment supporting 20000 mailboxes across 3 mailbox servers. As such, the above IO requirements are for ~6666 users.

So now that we have done the MS Exchange solution sizing (shown above is just the storage performance requirements), we understand the requirement to be around 651 mixed Read/Write IOPS per mailbox VM. We can then take a benchmark such as Jetstress and validate that the solution has sufficient storage performance.

To require the ~8000 IOPS the Jetstress test showed, we would need to scale up each Exchange instances to support have a much larger number of users and have each user send/receive 500 emails per day to reach this requirement.

8kJetstressIOPS

But in scaling up each Exchange instance to reach the peak IOPS that even this 3 year old generation Nutanix node can deliver we would vastly exceed the compute sizing recommendations for Exchange 2013 (being 24vCPUs and 96GB RAM) as shown by the calculator below.

ScaleUpExchange

As we can see, for an Exchange instance to require those peak IOPS, we would have to size the Mailbox server VMs with more than 10x the recommended vCPUs (24) and 15x the RAM (96GB). This shows that peak IOPS which can be achieved are not relevant in the real world.

In fact, Exchange generally does not require more than 1000 IOPS. Typically its requires much less, as my earlier example shows. So peak performance numbers are of little/no value as they can’t (and more importantly don’t need to be) reproduced in the real world.

With a tool like Jetstress we can configure a precise Mailbox profiles and test only what you require. If the solution can produce more IOPS than what you need (such as in this example), that’s fine for headroom, but in this day and age where Nutanix allows you to quickly and easily scale (Compute/Storage performance & capacity), I recommend designing for what you need in the foreseeable future (by this I mean 6-12 months) and scale if/when required.

What a benchmark does help you understand is how much headroom a solution has over and above your requirements which can help choose a solution to support mixed workloads, BUT the benchmark would need to be re-ran concurrently with suitable benchmarks for all other applications you intend on mixing to see how the solution behaves with mixed workloads.

As such, single application peak performance benchmarks are almost never valuable (to customers) unless your planning to run application specific silos. I strongly recommend anyone considering implementing an application specific silo, read the following article: Enterprise Architecture & Avoiding tunnel vision.

And… if you’re planning to run application specific silos and/or scaling up workloads to the point they need crazy IOPS, then you’re increasing the size of your failure domains, CAPEX and OPEX which is only doing yourself (or your customer) a disservice. But that’s a topic for another day.

I hope this example shows how real world requirements and performance is vastly different to what a benchmark shows and why peak performance benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt.

I’ve always said the focus should be on gathering requirements and delivering on business outcomes, not focusing on performance which is typically only a very small part of a solution that delivers a successful business outcome.

Summary:

When sizing an MS Exchange solution on Nutanix, IOPS is not a constraining factor even for large scale deployments. The most common constraining factor is the Microsoft recommended compute maximums being 24 vCPUs and 96GB RAM, which is the same constraint regardless of if you run on Nutanix, or any other virtual / physical platform.

Related Articles:

Nutanix Implementation of Data Avoidance & Reduction Technologies

Posted on by
Reply

While its not news that Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (NDSF) supports numerous data avoidance & reduction technologies, what is less well known is how these technologies can be enabled/disabled and used.

Before we begin, let me cover off what technologies NDSF offers:

Data Avoidance:

  • VAAI-NAS Fast File Clone (for ESXi)
  • View Composer for Array Integration (VCAI) for Horizon View
  • Native NDSF Clones (ESXi, Hyper-V and AHV)
  • ODX Copy Offload (Hyper-V)
  • Crash and Application Consistent snapshots (ESXi, Hyper-V and AHV)

Data Reduction:

  • Compression (In-Line and Post-Process)
  • Deduplication (Fingerprint on Write/In-Line for Performance Tier and/or Capacity Tier)
  • Erasure Coding (EC-X)

Data avoidance is designed to prevent the creation of unnecessary data which removes the requirement to leverage data reduction technologies. This means less work for the storage layer which results in more available front end IO to service the virtual machines.

An example of data avoidance is using VCAI with Horizon View to create Linked Clones near instantly which not only reduces space but ensures faster deployment and recompose activities with greatly reduced impact to the environment.

Data avoidance is greatly underrated in my opinion, as it results in lower compression/deduplication ratios, because there is no additional data to dedupe or compress. If Nutanix turned off these data avoidance technologies, it would result in HIGHER compression and dedupe ratios, which sounds great on a marketing slide or in a tweet, but in reality, avoiding work for the storage is a much better way to do things.

Some vendors report data avoidance such as snapshots in deduplication ratios, and this in my opinion is very misleading and designed to artifically inflate dedupe ratios for competitive purposes. For more information see: Deduplication ratios – What should be included in the reported ratio?

Data Reduction is still a valuable option to have but in my opinion its overrated. The reason I think its overrated is data reduction does not always work well. It greatly depends on your data type if you will see a good data reduction ratio or not, AND if the overheads (of which there is always an overhead) are worth it.

Let’s now focus on the NDSF implementation of Data Reduction technologies.

Compression:

Compression can be configured on new or existing containers and be set to In-Line or Post-Process. For post process, enter a “Delay” value e.g.: 60 to delay compression for 1 Hour, or 3600 for 1 day.

Compression

Compression can be reconfigured at any time, without the requirement to relocate VMs or reformat the storage. For data which is already compressed it will be uncompressed as part of a low priority background task (known as Curator). This ensures there is low/no impact of changing Compression settings, ensuring maximum flexibility for customers.

Because compression is configured per container, you can have VMs or even Virtual Disks running compression alongside VMs or Virtual Disks not running compression within the same NDSF cluster. This helps eliminate silos and ensures mixed workloads with different data types/profiles can co-exist efficiently.

Deduplication:

As with Compression, Deduplication can be configured on new or existing containers and be set to dedupe for the performance tier (SSD) and optionally for the Capacity (HDD) Tier. This means data reduction can be maximised for either or both tiers depending on customer requirements.

dedupeconfig

Again the same as Compression, Dedupe can be reconfigured at any time, without the requirement to relocate VMs or reformat the storage. For data which is already deduped the same low priority background task (Curator) rehydrates the data again ensuring there is low/no impact of changing dedupe settings and ensuring maximum flexibility for customers.

Because dedupe is configured per container, you can have VMs or even Virtual Disks running dedupe alongside VMs or Virtual Disks not running dedupe within the same NDSF cluster. Deduplication is also complimentary to Compression, meaning both can be ran at the same time to maximise data reduction and further eliminate silos ensuring mixed workloads can co-exist efficiently.

Erasure Coding (EC-X):

As with Compression & Dedupe, EC-X is enabled on a per container basis and is complimentary to both Compression and Dedupe. EC-X is a post-process only form of data reduction designed to work on Write cold data (meaning data which is not changing).

EC-X applies to data across the Performance Tier (SSD) and the Capacity Tier (SATA) which means the effective SSD capacity is increased, which means more data can be serviced by SSD, thus increasing performance.

ecxonoff

As previously discussed, NDSF supports different containers using different combinations of data reduction all within the same NDSF cluster to maximise efficiencies and eliminate unnecessary silos.

Summary:

Nutanix provides multiple technologies to minimise the data being stored on the distributed storage fabric while giving customers the flexibility to enable/disable and tune data reduction settings to suit different data profiles all within the same NDSF cluster.

Remember, “one size does not fit all” so it is importaint for the storage layer to be able treat your workloads differently based on their individual requirements.

Related Articles: