EMC VPLEX Uptime Bulletin

A newsletter from VPLEX Engineering

Volume 5 — December 2011

Another great year for EMC® VPLEX™ is nearly in the books. 2011 brought the release of GeoSyn-
chrony™ 5.0 that added Geo functionality to VPLEX, allowing active-active replication over asynchro-
nous distances. In addition, EMC recently announced the availability of VPLEX in a Field Rackable
Inside this issue:
option. This option is for customers that may not want or have the space for a dedicated VPLEX rack. EMC VPLEX Metro 1
With the Field Rackable option, VPLEX can now be installed into existing customer-supplied racks in over IP
the data center.
VPLEX Performance 2
EMC is planning another great year in 2012 and will constantly improve and add features to VPLEX to
Considerations
enhance its leadership position as the best storage virtualization solution available.
In addition to product improvements, we have been working closely with EMC’s partners to develop Recent VPLEX ETAs 2
solutions that highlight the unique features of VPLEX. One use case that we are very excited about is
extending Oracle RAC over distance using VPLEX Metro. With this solution, we simplify the creation VPLEX Rebuild 3
and management of a stretched Oracle RAC cluster by eliminating the complex disk management Transfer Size
normally required with stretched Oracle RAC and move the data replication to the VPLEX layer—
something at which it excels! Contact your local EMC representative for more information. Write Alignment 3

This issue of the VPLEX Uptime Bulletin has a lot of great information to ensure you are getting the EMC VPLEX Hot 4
best possible performance from your VPLEX. As always, VPLEX Engineering welcomes your feedback. Topics
Please email your suggestions to UptimeForVPLEX@emc.com.
Target Software 4
Remember that last year’s VPLEX Uptime Bulletins are always available individually and a consoli-
Levels
dated edition of the VPLEX Uptime Bulletin containing all past issues is also available on Powerlink®
at this path: Products > Hardware/Platforms > VPLEX Family > Uptime Bulletins.
- VPLEX Engineering

Find us on Powerlink:
EMC VPLEX Metro over IP http://powerlink.emc.com

As of November 14, 2011, the WAN communication transport media requirements for VPLEX Metro Products >
have been updated to include connectivity to Internet Protocol level 3-type interfaces across syn- Hardware/Platforms >
chronous distances. This expands on the already supported DWDM and FCIP environments on which VPLEX Family >
customers leverage VPLEX Metro on today. Uptime Bulletins

VPLEX Metro over IP is supported on the VS2 hardware plat- Subscribe to future Uptime
form and shipped with the appropriate SLICs per director in Bulletins by clicking on the
the VPLEX engines. The interface for this connection is a 10 EMC VPLEX
Gigabit Ethernet LC fiber port from each director into the cus- Consolidated Edition “Alert
tomer WAN. This requires that a 10 Gigabit interface receives Me!” icon.
that connection but this does not imply that there needs to
be a 10 Gigabit pipe between the two data centers being
connected by IP. This requirement is based on the pure na-
ture of 10 Gigabit Ethernet not being able to auto-negotiate to a 1 Gigabit Ethernet interface. How-
ever, the outbound WAN connection is not bound to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and 1 Gigabit from data
center to data center is completely supported and more likely to be available in today’s environ-
ments.
VPLEX Metro over IP is in alignment with the current requirements for Metro over FC, which supports
up to 5ms RTT. Anything higher than 5ms RTT would require a RPQ via local Sales resources. It is
always recommended that two redundant links be available for IP applications and service reliability.
Contact us:
If you do not currently have separate, redundant physical links, make sure to align with your Ethernet
provider on service level agreement that latency and availability limitations are adhered to! UptimeFor
VPLEX@emc.com
 Page 2 Uptime Bulletin: EMC VPLEX Edition

VPLEX Performance Considerations

EMC VPLEX is designed to be a high-performance, scalable device in your SAN. Utilizing best prac-
tices and proactive monitoring will ensure optimum performance in your virtualized environment.
Keep the following points in mind as you deploy VPLEX in your environment:
 Periodically monitor your VPLEX CPU utilization

It’s good practice to monitor VPLEX CPU utilization to ensure that the VPLEX directors are being
used in a balanced configuration, to understand peaks and nominal utilization, and for capacity
planning. Depending on workload variations, a CPU or director may become utilized beyond
90%. Host I/O timeouts are more likely when CPU utilization reaches > 90%. To ensure sufficient
CPU capacity is available in all circumstances, it is an EMC best practice to monitor and ensure
CPU utilization averages are within a nominal range (50%–75%) with peak utilizations below
90%. Please refer to the Performance Monitoring chapter in the EMC VPLEX CLI Guide for specif-
ics regarding monitoring CPU utilization, specifically the “director.busy” monitor statistic.
 Multipath judiciously

Maximize VPLEX When determining the number of front-end paths to configure, balance resilience requirements
with coherence traffic overhead. VPLEX normally has multiple paths configured from hosts, usu-
performance with ally across at least two independent fabrics, to ensure high availability of paths. More paths
these tips! provide more availability, of course. it is often believed that there is no performance impact as-
sociated with configuring additional paths, but this is not so. If a host is configured with
“extraneous” paths, there will be extra cache coherence traffic and overhead generated. The
best practice of creating two paths to two directors is more efficient than creating four paths to
four directors. More paths increase resiliency, but can impact performance.
 Tune appropriate multipathing policy

This is a corollary to minimizing paths used. Multipathing software typically tries to “load bal-
ance” I/O by arbitrarily using a round-robin algorithm across all available paths. PowerPath, by
contrast, uses an intelligent round robin policy (Adaptive) as its default for VPLEX. To further
maximize performance, use a fixed multipathing policy (e.g., PowerPath Standby mode). The
exception to this recommendation is if there is a significant skew in traffic to different directors,
in which case PowerPath Adaptive policy yields better performance. For more information on
validating multipathing on your hosts, refer to the Validating Host-Multi-pathing with EMC
VPLEX Technical Notes, available on Powerlink.
 Tune your networks 

While networks operate in an automated fashion, they may not be operating efficiently. For ex-
ample, a bandwidth drop for VPLEX might be caused because the automated negotiation speed
is not the maximum available. An EMC best practice is to ensure the maximum network speed is
configured throughout the storage area network to guarantee maximum possible throughput.
Similarly, look to minimize ISL hops whenever possible—less is more.

Recent VPLEX ETAs

An EMC Technical Advisory (ETA) identifies an issue that may cause serious negative impact to a
production environment. You can find the complete ETA list on Powerlink at Support > Technical
Documentation and Advisories > Technical Advisories > VPLEX—Customer ETA List.
The following list includes recent issued or reissued ETAs relevant for users of EMC VPLEX:

Solution ID EMC Technical Advisory Description

Contact us: VPLEX: No automatic synchronization after creating a Distributed

emc265372 Device that uses encapsulated Storage-Volume Claimed from the VPLEX
UptimeFor
GUI or from the VPlexcli when the —appc flag is not used.
VPLEX@emc.com
Uptime Bulletin: EMC VPLEX Edition Page 3

VPLEX Rebuild Transfer Size

Rebuild transfer size is a parameter that is used to determine the size of a chunk to copy when mi-
grating data. In the CLI it defaults to 2 MB, and in the GUI it defaults to 128 KB. This parameter can “Use smaller
control the relative priority of host I/O and migration I/O. rebuild transfer
While larger rebuild transfer sizes may result in migrations completing in a shorter period of time, sizes that minimize
they will have more of an impact on host I/O. The EMC best practice is to use smaller rebuild trans-
fer sizes that minimize application interference while still providing reasonable rebuild rates. After
application
determining that no impact to host I/O has occurred, a larger transfer size may be tried to increase interference while
transfer rate, if desired. It’s important to again verify that no host I/O impact is seen after the trans- still providing
fer size increase is made.
reasonable rebuild
For local migrations, I/O is limited on the back end to 128 KB, so there is no advantage to using rates.”
larger sizes.

Write Alignment
As is common in most modern storage arrays or disk drives, VPLEX relies on a 4 KB sector size and
requires file systems and application write I/O be aligned on a 4 KB boundary. Failure to properly
align partitions can lead to increased read and write I/O activity in some cases, which may cause a
negative impact to overall performance.
A few misconceptions about VPLEX misalignment:
 “Partitions can/should be aligned on disk cylinder boundaries.”
No, partitions should be aligned to an offset from sector 0 that is divisible by 4 KB. However,
this may be needed by array best practices.
 “I can’t get misaligned I/O if my partition is aligned.”
No, if an application issues a write that has an LBA not divisible by 4 KB, it will be misaligned.
 “Misaligned writes only affect my application.”
No, misaligned I/O will consume VPLEX CPU resources, and possibly slow down I/O system-
wide.
 “I can/can’t control whether my application issues misaligned writes.”
Maybe. Some applications issue misaligned writes by default, but can be configured to use
4 KB blocks or a multiple thereof only. Other applications may be partially configurable. And yet
others can’t be configured. For example, most databases can be configured (Sybase uses 2 KB
default, DB2 4 KB, Oracle 8 KB). Microsoft SQL is partially configurable, e.g., the buffer page
size is 8 KB, but the log file can write arbitrary sectors. Please refer to best practices materials
specific to your particular operating system and logical volume management choices.
 “There is no way to address file systems; they may always write arbitrary blocks.”
While that may have been true in the past (circa 2002), newer operating systems need to recog-
nize block storage devices with sector sizes greater than 512 bytes. If the file system is created
with 4 KB sectors, and is aligned, it will alleviate all misaligned writes. Of course, that is only
available for newly created file systems, or file systems that can be migrated—and at the ex-
pense of some extra space. Newer file systems include Windows Server 2008, Linux 2.6 and
beyond, Solaris 10 and beyond, and most recent releases of proprietary UNIXs.
 “Subpage writes are the same/different from misaligned writes.”
Subpage writes are writes less than 4 KB in size. They are always misaligned. Subpage writes
and misaligned writes can be confused in VPLEX because the VPLEX statistic used to monitor
misalignment is called “cache.subpg counts/s”. Random misaligned write traffic greater than 4
KB should have no more than a 7:8 ratio of misalignment (87.5%, i.e., 1/8th the traffic will be
Contact us:
aligned by chance). Higher ratios generally mean subpage I/O is occurring.
UptimeFor
VPLEX@emc.com
 Page 4 Uptime Bulletin: EMC VPLEX Edition

EMC VPLEX Hot Topics

Back-End Thin Pools
VPLEX supports using thinly provisioned back-end storage devices to use for creating extents. De-
pending on the back-end storage array’s behavior, the devices may become unavailable or read-only
when the supporting storage pool fills and is no longer able to allocate new space to allow for new
data to be written to the pool. Periodic monitoring of thin provisioned back-end storage pool utiliza-
tion is an EMC best practice to ensure continued availability to the data presented through VPLEX.
VPLEX Multipathing During Nondisruptive Upgrades
The VPLEX upgrade model involves a reboot of all directors (in two stages) after the new software has
been uploaded and installed. In order for this to work without interruption of I/O to the hosts, multi-
ple storage paths must be configured and working properly, along with host-based multipathing
software. The VPLEX Procedure Generator contains procedures for properly configuring back-end
storage arrays for use with VPLEX.
In addition, the Validating Host Multipathing with EMC VPLEX Technical Notes describe how to verify
that host multipathing is correctly installed and configured.

Target Software Levels

Remaining current on the target version of EMC GeoSynchrony software is an EMC best practice to
maintain stable and reliable environments. GeoSynchrony 5.0.1 for VPLEX is the current target re-
lease of software and contains fixes that are critical to the continued stability of the VPLEX system.
In addition, GeoSynchrony 5.0.1 includes new features outlined in the Q3 2011 edition of the VPLEX
Uptime Bulletin.

Software Release Date % of Systems

GeoSynchrony 5.0.1 September 9, 2011 More than 30%

Upgrading to target GeoSynchrony software at least twice a year is an EMC best practice.
Please contact your local EMC Customer Service Representative for information and requirements
for upgrading to the most stable and feature-rich version of GeoSynchrony.

VPLEX Uptime Bulletin Powerlink > Hardware/Platforms > VPLEX Family > Uptime Bulletins

VPLEX Simple Support

E-Lab Navigator > Simple Support Matrix > EMC VPLEX and GeoSynchrony
Matrix

VPLEX Procedure Powerlink > Support > Product and Diagnostic Tools > Procedure Generators
Generator > VPLEX Procedure Generator

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Phone: 508-435-1000
Email: UptimeForVPLEX@emc.com
EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information
is subject to change without notice.
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SENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION,
AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICU-
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EMC2, EMC, GeoSynchrony, Powerlink, VPLEX, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trade-
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are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Published in the USA. 12/11