A couple of months ago my company decided that we needed more hardware to boost up a new and more powerful web application. After some research, a few calls to our partner DELL and a quick meeting they give us the opportunity to test their new Equallogic PS5000XV. We've managed to test it for 2 days and must say, I was astonished by the ease of use and quickly put up 2 servers running with it. We've tested it with Ubuntu Server 8.10 and VMWARE server and it all run smoothly. Even a VM SQL Server 2005 worked as fast as if with local disks. We pretty much decided to venture in using the PS5000XV for a full virtualization solution. We've come up with this idea of using 2 DELL PE2950 and one PS5000XV and to start virtualizing 6 servers and to venture a little bit more on Ubuntu as the OS.
PS5000XV Highlights:
15,000 RPM, 146, 300 or 450 GB SAS drives
16 drive chassis
Dual controller modules, each with 64-bit dual core RISC processor
Battery-backed and mirrored RAID cache
Automatic RAID 5, RAID 10, and RAID 50 configuration
Highly flexible, space-efficient volume snapshots
Auto-capable volume replication
Complete storage solution with heterogeneous OS support
Automatic load balancing
Scales without service disruption
2.4, 4.8 or 7.2 TB of raw capacity
EqualLogic Multi-path I/O
Exceptional sequential and transactional application performance
Performance scales linearly as arrays are added
Ingredients:
1 - DELL Equallogic PS5000XV iSCSI storage including CDs & Manuals
2 - DELL PowerEdge PE2950 Servers including CDs & Manuals
2 - DELL PowerConnect PC5424i Switches
16 - Yellow UTP CAT6 cables (length according to needs)
2 - Blue UTP CAT6 cables (length according to needs)
2 - Red UTP CAT6 cables (length according to needs)
2 - Power Distributor Units (PDU) with 4 sockets available each
8 - Power cables (length according to needs)
Get it:
- Freshly burned CD with VMWARE ESXi (free download)
- Freshly burned CD with Ubuntu Server 8.10 64Bit version (free download, also available as 32bits)
- Putty SSH Client or Poderosa Multitab SSH Client
Additional elements:
- 9 - 192.168.1.x Private IP addresses
- 8 – Public IP addresses (6 if you don’t need them on the ESX servers) for the internal network
- 5 - 192.168.100.x Private IP addresses for the iSCSI network
Preparation:
Mix all the ingredients, following the instructions detailed bellow. :-)
Start by doing some nice drawing to help you. Here’s one I’ve made earlier.
So, it’s time to put all things together. Unpack, house and connect all servers. But… where to begin and how to connect it all? After some research and a lot of "RTFM", I've came up with the following:
The PS5000XV has two controllers with 3 Ethernet ports each. Only one of the controllers is running at a time and in case of failure it will resume function.
To provide redundancy, two of the PS5000XV Ethernet interfaces should be connected to one switch and the remaining 3rd interface to the other switch
All servers should have at least one Ethernet port on each switch
To connect the 2 switches, a Link Aggregation Group Port should be established with 4 ports (I've read it somewhere that it should be at least 6 ports... It does make sense, but I will go along with 4 just to see.)
To improve performance, Jumbo Frames must be activated on all Ethernet devices and Flow control should be disable as well as Auto-Negotiation on Ethernet Ports.
You can see that we talk a lot on using 2 gigabit interfaces on the devices. There's a reason for that: the maximum IOPS on the PS5000XV is 2.1 Gbps. As each interface is 1 Gbps we need to make 2 to make it profitable.
Now it's time to address and connect all the devices. Back to the "drawing board".
Humm.. Seems we are going to need a lot of cabling. Prep up your Dymo labeler and start cabling and identifying the cables!
Each PE2950 will have 3 IP addresses. One for the connections between servers (blue cable, Private Network), one for “outside network” (the public IP address in red) and the other for the iSCSI network (shown in yellow).
As you can see, there are 3 cables coming out from the PS5000XV. Two of them connects to one switch and the other to the other switch. This provides redundancy in case of switch or cable failure.
There are 4 cables connecting the 2 PC5424i forming a Link Aggregation Group (LAG). This configuration will be addressed later.
On the PE2950, two Ethernet ports are connected in ESX forming a single NIC Card (NIC Teaming). The virtual machines will be configured with one or more virtual NICs connected to these physical NICs in the PE2950 as needed. Not showed in the diagram are all other equipment already present in the infra-structure, but you can imagine we will need at least one DNS Server or Windows AD Servers if we were to install Windows on the Virtual servers.
Installing and Initializing the PS5000XV
Installation is as easy as putting the “Equallogic Host integration Tools for Microsoft Windows CD” on any Windows XP or Windows 200x server and the Host Integration Tools will popu-up. There's no Linux way to do this that I've knowledge off. Clik the “Install” button (obviously) to install applications onto your Workstation.
Just follow the wizard to install the needed components. You won’t need MultiPath I/O DSM for the time being (one less reboot J). You should have a new Program Group called EqualLogic and an application named Remote Setup Wizard. Just run it.
It will then start searching for any uninitialized PS Series Array and it will list them for you.
Click the “Next” button and get ready for some questions.
Member name: A Unique name (up to 63 numbers, letters, or hyphens) used to identify the array in the group. The first character must be a letter or number.
IP address: Network address for the Ethernet0 network interface.
Netmask: Combines with the IP address to identify the subnet on which the Ethernet0 network interface resides.
Default gateway: Network address for the device used to connect subnets and forward network traffic beyond the local network.
And after clicking “Next”, we have a few more questions to answer.
Group name: Unique name (up to 63 letters, numbers, or hyphens) used to identify the group. The first character must be a letter or number.
Group IP address: Network address for the group. The group IP address is used for group administration and host access to data stored in the group.
Password for managing group membership: Password required when adding members to the group. The password must have three to 16 alphanumeric characters and is case-sensitive.
Password for the default group administration account: Password that will override the factory-set password (grpadmin) for the default grpadmin account. The password must have three to 16 alphanumeric characters and is case-sensitive.
Microsoft service user name and password: CHAP user name and password used to enable Microsoft service (VSS or VDS) access to the group. The user name must have between three and 54 alphanumeric characters. The password must have 12 to 16 alphanumeric characters, and is case-sensitive. Microsoft services running on a computer must be allowed access to the group in order to create VSS snapshots in the group or use VDS.
Press next and wait while the array is being initialized…
If all goes well, you’ll get this!
Now we have a PS5000XV fully functional and ready for us to begin configurating.
Now to see it in action.
Type https://your.ip.add.ress on your browser and enter grpadmin as the username and previously set password.
First thing to do is set additional NIC IP addresses. On Group EQLSANGRP01, expand Members and select EQLSANMEMBER01. Select Network tab and double click on eth1.
Set IP, Netmask and gateway as desired. Do the same for eth2.
Enable the 2 interfaces by clicking on each one and select Enable interface on left Menu
This way in case of eth0 failure we can still access the SAN.
And that’s all we need for now.
See you in Part 2 where I will demonstrate how to install ESXi 3.5 on PE2950....
