InfoScale™ 9.0 Virtualization Guide - Linux on ESXi
- Section I. Overview
- Section II. Deploying Veritas InfoScale products in a VMware environment
- Getting started
- Storage configurations and feature compatibility
- About setting up VMware with InfoScale™ products
- InfoScale™ products support for VMware environments
- Installing and configuring storage solutions in the VMware virtual environment
- Recommendations for improved resiliency of InfoScale clusters in virtualized environments
- Understanding Storage Configuration
- Configuring storage
- Enabling disk UUID on virtual machines
- Installing Array Support Library (ASL) for VMDK on cluster nodes
- Excluding the boot disk from the Volume Manager configuration
- Creating the VMDK files
- Mapping the VMDKs to each virtual machine (VM)
- Enabling the multi-write flag
- Getting consistent names across nodes
- Creating a file system
- Getting started
- Section III. Use cases for Veritas InfoScale product components in a VMware environment
- Application availability using Cluster Server
- Multi-tier business service support
- Improving data protection, storage optimization, data migration, and database performance
- Use cases for InfoScale™ product components in a VMware guest
- Protecting data with InfoScale™ product components in the VMware guest
- Optimizing storage with InfoScale™ product components in the VMware guest
- About Flexible Storage Sharing
- About SmartTier in the VMware environment
- About compression with InfoScale™ product components in the VMware guest
- About thin reclamation with InfoScale™ product components in the VMware guest
- About SmartMove with InfoScale™ product components in the VMware guest
- About SmartTier for Oracle with InfoScale™ product components in the VMware guest
- Migrating data with InfoScale™ product components in the VMware guest
- Improving database performance with InfoScale™ product components in the VMware guest
- Setting up virtual machines for fast failover using InfoScale Enterprise on VMware disks
- About use cases for InfoScale Enterprise in the VMware guest
- InfoScale Enterprise operation in VMware virtualized environments
- InfoScale functionality and compatibility matrix
- About setting up InfoScale Enterprise on VMware ESXi
- Section IV. Reference
InfoScale™ component limitations in an ESXi environment
Some limitations apply for using InfoScale and InfoScale Enterprise with VMware ESXi:
Sharing VMDK files between virtual machines
When sharing VMDK files between virtual machines, SCSI BUS sharing mode for the corresponding SCSI controllers can be set to either "Physical" or "Virtual" modes. Setting this mode to "Physical" causes SCSI reservation conflict and I/O error on DMP. This issue occurs in LVM and raw disks also.
Solution:
Disable simultaneous write protection for the shared disk using the multi-writer flag. The procedure is described in the following VMware Knowledge Base article:
Volume Replicator (VVR) option
VVR is supported inside a Virtual Machine. Keep in mind that VVR can use a significant amount of network bandwidth (depends on the amount of data written to disk) and this can reduce the available network bandwidth for other virtual machines. Since the network card is a shared resource, ensure that enough bandwidth is available to sustain the writes happening to disk.
VMware snapshots
The following limitations apply for VMware snapshots:
VMware snapshots are not supported when raw device mapping is used in physical mode, regardless of whether InfoScale™ components are installed or not. The REDO-log functionality that is required for VMware Snapshots is not available with raw device mapping used in the physical mode.
InfoScale™ components support VMDK file utilization as a backend storage to overcome this limitation.
InfoScale™ components also support raw device mapping in the logical mode and VMware snapshots, since RDM-logical mode uses the same level of SCSI virtualization as VMDK files.
VMware snapshots are not supported when using VMDK files as backend storage and the multi-writer flag has been set. For example, when using InfoScale Enterprise with VMDK files. This is a VMware limitation.
VMware snapshots are not supported with any VM using disks managed by the VMwareDisks agent.
vMotion (Live Migration)
For InfoScale Foundation: vMotion is supported.
For InfoScale Availability and Cluster Server (VCS):
VMware vMotion has a limitation that affects all clustering software. vMotion is not supported when a virtual SCSI controller is set to have sharing enabled. Virtual SCSI controller sharing is a virtual machine attribute and is required to be set for the virtual machines that share storage between each other (on the same physical ESXi server or between physical ESXi servers). Essentially all clustering products that rely on SAN storage require this attribute to be set.
VCS provides the VMwareDisks agent to override this limitation and enable shared storage for InfoScale Availability to operate. InfoScale Availability supports VMDK files and therefore vMotion.
See About setting up InfoScale Enterprise on VMware ESXi.
This limitation does not affect the virtual machines that do not have the sharing attribute turned on for their virtual SCSI controllers.
For InfoScale Enterprise: vMotion is supported.
N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
NPIV used with InfoScale Foundation is fully supported. No additional setup tasks are required for InfoScale Foundation when the storage is NPIV-enabled.
VMware currently does not support I/O fencing with NPIV for any other 3rd party clustering software other than MSCS. In VMware environments, InfoScale products supports I/O fencing using the Coordination Point server as an arbitration mechanism.