{"id":2014,"date":"2012-04-09T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T18:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/?p=2014"},"modified":"2012-12-30T14:50:51","modified_gmt":"2012-12-30T20:50:51","slug":"vmware-vsphere-and-emc-isilon-one-datastore-or-many","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasemccarty.com\/blog\/vmware-vsphere-and-emc-isilon-one-datastore-or-many\/","title":{"rendered":"VMware vSphere and EMC Isilon – One datastore or many?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a vSpecialist, I am a member of a group that focuses on Big Data solutions. I primarily focus on Big Data storage, notably Isilon. I was introduced to Isilon early last year and really liked it.<\/p>\n

I got my first deep-dive with Isilon before EMC World 2011, where I was given the Isilon vLab, and asked to finish it up. I took the content that the Isilon team had provided, made some subtle changes, and polished it up a bit. The one thing that I found, was that Isilon was EASY to use. I was fortunate enough to use Isilon more throughout the year in 2011, as well as adding Isilon to the VMware Partner Labs at VMworld 2011.<\/p>\n

The first time I configured Isilon in the lab for use by vSphere (4.1 then), I didn’t really know what the best practices were.\u00a0 Fortunately, in January (2012), Isilon published a white paper on using Isilon with VMware vSphere 5. That paper can be found here:\u00a0http:\/\/simple.isilon.com\/doc-viewer\/1739\/best-practices-guide-for-vmware-vsphere.pdf<\/a><\/strong>. Information on configuring NFS starts at page 15.<\/p>\n

This post is a high level overview when using vSphere 5.0 and NFS storage from an Isilon cluster.<\/p>\n

Mounting cluster datastores on a single node<\/strong>
\n\"vSphere<\/a>As nodes are added to an Isilon cluster the shared resources can be accessed from any of the nodes.\u00a0 The default root (\/ifs) is available to all nodes in the cluster.\u00a0 From a basic perspective, a single node’s IP address could be used to access one or more NFS exports.<\/p>\n

In a situation where a node were to be taken offline for maintenance, or were to fail, datastores connected to a dedicated IP address would fail, unless SmartConnect Advanced was being used.<\/p>\n

Using SmartConnect Advanced in this manner, only accommodates for a node going offline, but does not handle any additional throughput.\u00a0 With all NFS datastores being mounted to a single node, throughput is limited to that with the specified node can provide.<\/p>\n

SmartConnect for accessing NFS shares<\/strong>
\nBefore going into the different methods of connecting to NFS shares for vSphere datastores, it is important to know how SmartConnect works.\u00a0 SmartConnect is the Isilon feature that handles connection availability and load balancing for Isilon clusters.<\/p>\n

I used to think that the coolest thing about Isilon, was that nodes can be added “on the fly”: