Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Technical Manual
Dell EqualLogic Best Practices Series
Integrating the Dell
EqualLogic FS7500 into
an Existing SAN
A Dell Technical Whitepaper
Storage I nfrastructur e and Soluti ons Enginee ring
Dell Product Group
February 2012
THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL
ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.
© 2011 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this material in any manner whatsoever without
the express written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell.
Dell
, the
DELL
logo, and the
PowerVault™
Inc., in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.
VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.
Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.
Directory®
States and/or other countries.
other countries.
are trademarks of Dell Inc
are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United
DELL
Linux®
badge,
PowerConnect
. Red Hat®
Microsoft®, Windows®, Windows Server®
is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and
™,
EqualLogic
is a registered trademark or trademark of Red Hat,
VMware®
is a registered trademark or trademark of
Intel®
™,
PowerEdge
is a registered trademark of Intel
™ and
, and
Active
BP1016 Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an Existing SAN i
Table of Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................ 1
1
1.1 Audience ...................................................................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Terminology ............................................................................................................................................... 2
2 Dell EqualLogic FS7500 ................................................................................................................................... 3
2.1 EqualLogic FS7500 support for Network Attached Storage.............................................................. 3
3 Test topology and architecture ...................................................................................................................... 5
4 Test methodology .............................................................................................................................................. 7
5 Test results and analysis ................................................................................................................................... 8
6 Planning and design considerations ............................................................................................................. 11
6.1 Network ports ........................................................................................................................................... 11
6.2 IP addresses ............................................................................................................................................... 11
6.3 Pool configuration ...................................................................................................................................12
6.4 Volume configuration ..............................................................................................................................13
6.5 Monitoring an existing SAN ....................................................................................................................13
7 Summary ............................................................................................................................................................ 15
Appendix A Vdbench scripts ........................................................................................................................... 16
Related publications ................................................................................................................................................ 17
BP1016
Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an Existing SAN ii
Date
Status
August 2011
Initial publication
File System
Acknowledgements
This whitepaper was produced by the PG Storage Infrastructure and Solutions team between January
2011 and August 2011 at the Dell Labs facility in Round Rock, Texas.
The team that created this whitepaper:
Michael Kosacek, Arun Rajan, and Margaret Boeneke
We would like to thank the following Dell team members for providing significant support during
development and review:
Tony Ansley, Richard Golasky, and Chris Almond
Feedback
The Dell Storage Infrastructure and Solutions Team encourages readers of this publication to provide
feedback on the quality and usefulness of this information. You can submit feedback as follows:
Use the “
registration required):
http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Integrating+the+Dell+EqualLogic+FS7500+into+an+existi
ng+SAN
Start a new thread” link on the following page (Dell Enterprise Technology Center
Revisions
February 2012 Dell Scalable File System changed to Dell Fluid
BP1016
Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an Existing SAN iii
1 Introduction
The Dell™ EqualLogic™ FS7500 adds scale-out unified Network Attached Storage (NAS) capabilities to
EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SANs so you can easily enable and manage iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS access
from a single management console. The EqualLogic FS7500 incorporates the Dell Fluid File System
(FluidFS), which is designed to optimize file access performance and hardware utilization while
eliminating capacity constraints. FluidFS is a high-performance scale-out file system capable of
presenting a single file-system namespace through a virtual IP address, regardless of the number of
NAS controller nodes in the cluster.
The FS7500 attaches to an EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN and can be deployed with new arrays, or it
can leverage an existing EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN deployment. Unlike many unified storage
solutions that only scale in capacity, the EqualLogic FS7500 can scale capacity and performance.
When more storage capacity or I/O performance is required, adding more EqualLogic arrays or
another FS7500 controller pair enables the system to scale out to meet those needs.
While many NAS solutions have strict limits on file share size, FluidFS has no such limitations and the
FS7500 allows a single file system to use the entire capacity
EqualLogic products, the entire feature set of the FS7500, software licensing, and future firmware
enhancements are all included in the base price.
When integrating the FS7500 into an existing SAN, you need to understand the potential impacts to
the existing SAN.
The goal of this paper is to understand:
• What is the performance impact of adding file I/O to an existing block-based SAN with
additional hosts attached?
• Is it OK to mix block and file I/O in the same pool, or is it better to keep them separated?
• How much does adding additional arrays to an existing shared pool benefit the overall SAN
performance?
• How much free space is required for the FS7500?
• How many additional network ports are required when integrating the FS7500 into an existing
SAN?
The results presented in this paper can be used as a guideline to help you determine the right answers
for your own environment.
1
of an EqualLogic pool. As with all Dell
1.1 Audience
This white paper is intended for storage administrators who are involved in the planning and
implementation of integrating a Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an existing EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI
SAN. Readers should be familiar with general concepts of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI storage
as well as Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN) and basic NAS concepts.
1
Maximum of 509TB usable today
BP1016
Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an Existing SAN 1
Note: For additional details and definitions see the following document:
1.2 Terminology
The following terms are used throughout this document.
Block I/O Commonly used to describe how an application on a host server accesses
data on a local or SAN connected storage system.
CIFS Common Internet File System; typically used by Windows clients to access
NAS.
File I/O Commonly used to describe application or client access to a NFS mount
point or CIFS share.
Group A PS Series group consists of one or more PS Series arrays connected to an IP
network. A group may contain up to 16 arrays.
LAN Local Area Network; network usually used for client connectivity
NAS Network Attached Storage; usually supporting protocols such as CIFS and
NFS.
NFS Network File System; typically used by Unix/Linux systems to access NAS.
Pool A container that each member (array) is assigned to after being added to a
group. A pool can have up to 8 members.
SAN Storage Area Network; a network used exclusively for storage connectivity
that usually supports iSCSI or Fibre Channel access to storage.
Structured Data Describes data that has a predefined structure of its components such as a
database.
Unstructured Data Describes data that does not have a predefined structure such as user files on
a share.
Dell EqualLogic Configuration Guide
http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=9831
, available at:
BP1016
Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an Existing SAN 2
www.dell.com/FS7500
2 Dell EqualLogic FS7500
The FS7500 is a dual active/active architecture that consists of a redundant pair of appliance-like
controller nodes with a backup power supply. The large onboard cache gives the EqualLogic FS7500
the ability to scale performance. Each system provides 48GB of RAM (24GB in each controller node)
that is used for the operating system and the mirrored, battery protected cache memory. The FS7500
can be expanded by adding an additional pair of controllers and new client connections are
automatically load balanced across all nodes.
The EqualLogic FS7500 supports all new and existing EqualLogic arrays with firmware version 5.1 and
later. A single FS7500 system can utilize up to eight EqualLogic PS Series Arrays with the ability to add
another FS7500 system into the same namespace to improve file performance. Each EqualLogic
FS7500 controller has four 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports for NAS connectivity for NFS and CIFS clients. Four
more 1 Gigabit ports are used to connect to the EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN. An additional five
ports on each controller are used for internal communications such as IPMI, cluster heartbeat, and
cache mirroring.
The FS7500 also has built-in snapshot capabilities, using a redirect-on-write method. When a
snapshot is enabled, any changes to existing data are preserved in a snapshot, and subsequent
read/write access is redirected to the new data area. This method of snapshots is implemented in
FluidFS and does not require additional physical disk space for holding snapshots and instead it utilizes
reserved, unused space from the existing NAS file system.
Although outside of the scope of this document, additional features of the FS7500 also include Active
Directory/LDAP integration, NDMP–based backup support, NIS (Network Information Services) and
user quotas.
Note: For additional information on the features of the EqualLogic FS7500, see:
EqualLogic FS7500 Unified Storage Solution
2.1 EqualLogic FS7500 support for Network Attached Storage
Until now, EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SANs have only supported hosts attached for block storage. With
the integration of the FS7500, EqualLogic SAN owners can now support NFS and CIFS file I/O as well.
Management of the FS7500 is integrated into the EqualLogic Group Manager so that the administrator
can manage both file and block storage from the same application. The EqualLogic Group Manager
continues to use the same user interface, so you do not need to learn a new tool to manage NAS.
Traditional file servers, database servers, mail, and other application servers use local or SAN-attached
block storage. Sometimes a single traditional file server is adequate, however, in other cases
performance, scalability, and even functionality of a single file server can be a limiting factor and using
multiple file servers may have additional management challenges. With the FS7500, it is possible to
consolidate these multiple file servers down to a single namespace and management entity which can
easily be scaled out to meet performance needs due to the scalable nature of both the underlying
EqualLogic SAN and the FluidFS running on the FS7500.
BP1016
Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an Existing SAN 3
Loading...