Implementation Planning

Jason Nash
www.jasonnash.com
@TheJasonNash
 Things to Consider

Use Case & Other Services

Type of Data
Workload Required

Connectivity Physical Configuration

Types Requirements Pre-Reqs

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 What Are Your Use Cases?

Different use cases will dictate the number of bricks

you need due to performance and overall capacity

Virtual Machines?
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 Understanding Workload

 Important to understand type of work you plan to house on the

XtremIO
 High performance
 Unique data or easily deduplicated

 Dictates how many bricks and what growth will look like
 How many to start?
 Planned growth?

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 A Little About Deduplication

Some data simply doesn’t dedupe very well

Pluralsight.jpg

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 A Little About Deduplication

Others dedupe very efficiently

Virtual Desktops

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 Other Services

 Do you need other file services such as SMB/CIFS or NFS?

 Will need to provide those with other servers
 Common to export out via virtual machine

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 Other Services

 Do you need to replicate data to another site?

 As of version 2.4 there is no internal replication
 Will need other solution such as VPLEX/RecoverPoint
 Several options for virtual environments such as Zerto

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 Type of Connectivity

 XtremIO is very high performance

 You want a matching interconnect

 Recommended to use 8Gb Fibre Channel switches

 Though 4Gb will work

 iSCSI will be handled via 10Gb Ethernet

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 Physical Requirements

 First Xbrick takes 6U of rack space

 2U for controllers
 2U for DAE
 2U for Battery Backup Units (BBU)

 Second Xbrick takes 6U of rack space

 No BBU
 Add two Infiniband switches

 Third Xbrick takes 6U of rack space

 Another set of BBUs

 Fourth Xbrick takes 4U of rack space

 No BBU
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 Add another 1U of you use a physical XMS in This Space
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 Power and Space Requirements

 Amount of space required depends on number of bricks

1 Brick 6U used ~215lbs

2 Bricks 13U used ~420lbs
4 Bricks 23U used ~760lbs

 Power is supplied via C14 connections

 Number varies by installation size

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 Rack Diagram

 Notice that there is a placeholder between

the Inifniband Switches (IBSW-1 / IBSW – 2)
 Used for cable management
 Can be removed via RPQ

 Highly suggested to follow this diagram

 Will line up with the logical configuration you
do later

 Physical XMS goes at the bottom or leave as

placeholder

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 Configuration Pre-Reqs

 There are several things needed for configuration

 Best to gather these up front
 Avoids delays

 For each Xbrick you will need

 2 IP Addresses for Management
 2 IP Addresses for Lights-Out Management
 Default Gateway for both
 2 IP Addresses for iSCSI interfaces (if used)

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 Configuration Pre-Reqs

 There are also some naming conventions you will create

 Controller names
 Cluster names

 Don’t forget the XtremIO Management Station

 IP address and name

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 Summary

 Things to consider
 What are your use cases?

 What type of performance requirements do you have?

 What type of data will you be storing?

 What type of connectivity do you need?

 Is the physical environment ready?

 Have you met the pre-reqs?

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