This IBM® RedpaperTM publication describes best practices for deploying IBM FlashSystemTM V9000 enterprise storage system in a VMware vSphere environment. It includes guidelines and examples of the latest FlashSystem V9000 hardware and software, integrated with VMware version 6, to demonstrate the business benefits these solutions. Topics illustrate planning, configuring, operations, and preferred practices that include integration of FlashSystem V9000 with the VMware vCloud suite of applications: vCenter Web Client (VWC) vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM/SRA) The authors also describe how to deploy a cloud-based solution with FlashSystem V9000 in an environment with VMware and IBM SpectrumTM Control Base Edition 2.1.1. This paper is intended for presales consulting engineers, sales engineers, and IBM clients who want to deploy IBM FlashSystem V9000 in virtualized data centers that are based on VMware vSphere.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication details the configuration and best practices for using the IBM FlashSystem® family of storage products within a VMware environment. The first version of this book was published in 2021 and specifically addressed IBM Spectrum® Virtualize Version 8.4 with VMware vSphere 7.0. This second version of this book includes all the enhancements that are available with IBM Spectrum Virtualize 8.5. Topics illustrate planning, configuring, operations, and preferred practices that include integration of IBM FlashSystem storage systems with the VMware vCloud suite of applications: VMware vSphere Web Client (vWC) vSphere Storage APIs - Storage Awareness (VASA) vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) Embedded VASA Provider for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) This book is intended for presales consulting engineers, sales engineers, and IBM clients who want to deploy IBM FlashSystem storage systems in virtualized data centers that are based on VMware vSphere.
The success or failure of businesses often depends on how well organizations use their data assets for competitive advantage. Deeper insights from data require better information technology. As organizations modernize their IT infrastructure to boost innovation rather than limit it, they need a data storage system that can keep pace with highly virtualized environments, cloud computing, mobile and social systems of engagement, and in-depth, real-time analytics. Making the correct decision on storage investment is critical. Organizations must have enough storage performance and agility to innovate as they need to implement cloud-based IT services, deploy virtual desktop infrastructure, enhance fraud detection, and use new analytics capabilities. At the same time, future storage investments must lower IT infrastructure costs while helping organizations to derive the greatest possible value from their data assets. IBM® FlashSystem storage solutions can accelerate the transformation of the modern organizations into an IBM Cognitive BusinessTM. FlashSystem all-flash storage arrays are purpose-engineered to support the organization's active data sets. FlashSystem solutions offer a broad range of industry-leading storage virtualization and data management features that can provide improved storage system performance, efficiency, and reliability. Even better, FlashSystem can be less expensive than conventional enterprise storage solutions. This IBM Redbooks® Product Guide describes IBM FlashSystem® V9000, which is a comprehensive all-flash enterprise storage solution that delivers the full capabilities of IBM FlashCoreTM technology. In addition, it provides a rich set of software-defined storage features, including IBM Real-time CompressionTM, dynamic tiering, thin provisioning, snapshots, cloning, replication, data copy services, and IBM HyperSwap® for high availability. With the release of FlashSystem V9000 Software V7.7.1, extra functions and features are available, including support for new and more powerful FlashSystem V9000 control enclosure Model AC3 and new SAS-based small form factor (SFF) and large form factor (LFF) expansion enclosures that provide a mixture of nearline hard disk drives (HDDs) and flash mdisks in a pool that can be used for IBM Easy Tier®. The new IBM FlashSystem V9000 SFF expansion enclosure Model 24F offers new tiering options with low-cost solid-state drive (SSD). Up to 20 serial-attached SCSI (SAS) expansions are supported per FlashSystem V9000 controller pair, providing up to 480 drives with expansion Model 24F and up to 240 drives with expansion Model 12F. Also new with FlashSystem V9000 Software V7.7.1 is N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) support, which virtualizes worldwide port names (WWPNs) for zero path reduction during controller maintenance and outages. FlashSystem V9000 Software version 7.7.1 replaces version 7.7, and is available to all IBM FlashSystem V9000 customers with current warranty or software maintenance agreements.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication details the configuration and best practices for using IBM's FlashSystem family of storage products within a VMware environment. This book was published in 2021 and specifically addresses Spectrum Virtualize Version 8.4 with VMware vSphere Version 7.0. Topics illustrate planning, configuring, operations, and preferred practices that include integration of FlashSystem storage systems with the VMware vCloud suite of applications: - vSphere Web Client (VWC) - vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) - vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) - Site Recovery Manager (SRM) - vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) This book is intended for presales consulting engineers, sales engineers, and IBM clients who want to deploy IBM FlashSystem® storage systems in virtualized data centers that are based on VMware vSphere.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication captures several of the preferred practices and describes the performance gains that can be achieved by implementing the IBM FlashSystem® products that are powered by IBM Spectrum® Virtualize Version 8.4.2. These practices are based on field experience. This book highlights configuration guidelines and preferred practices for the storage area network (SAN) topology, clustered system, back-end storage, storage pools and managed disks, volumes, Remote Copy services, and hosts. It explains how you can optimize disk performance with the IBM System Storage Easy Tier® function. It also provides preferred practices for monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting. This book is intended for experienced storage, SAN, IBM FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller, and IBM Storwize® administrators and technicians. Understanding this book requires advanced knowledge of these environments.
This IBM Redbooks publication captures several of the preferred practices and describes the performance gains that can be achieved by implementing the IBM FlashSystem® products. These practices are based on field experience. This book highlights configuration guidelines and preferred practices for the storage area network (SAN) topology, clustered system, back-end storage, storage pools and managed disks, volumes, Remote Copy services, and hosts. It explains how you can optimize disk performance with the IBM System Storage Easy Tier® function. It also provides preferred practices for monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting. This book is intended for experienced storage, SAN, IBM FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller, and IBM Storwize® administrators and technicians. Understanding this book requires advanced knowledge of these environments.
The purpose of this IBM® Redpaper® document is to provide best practice guidelines to design and implement IBM FlashSystem® storage for database workloads. The recommended settings and values are based on lab testing, proof of concept (PoC) and experience drawn from customer implementations. Suggestions that are presented in this document are applicable to most production database environments to increase performance of I/O and availability. However, more considerations might be required while designing, configuring, and implementing storage for extreme transactional, analytical, and database cluster environments. Customers are migrating database storage to IBM FlashSystem largely due to low latency performance of the IBM FlashSystem family of Storage. Using IBM FlashSystem, IBM customers are able to achieve low latency for queries and transactions from milliseconds to microseconds, realize a multi-fold increase in application level transactions per second, increase CPU efficiency and reduce database licensing costs. Recent additions of data reduction technologies to IBM FlashSystem further increase overall TCO benefits. All IBM FlashSystem models now offer compression, which can reduce database storage by 40 - 80% depending on database software. In addition to best practices that are described in this document, the IBM FlashSystem Worldwide Solutions Engineering Team can further assist customers with performing analysis of current database workloads for IBM FlashSystem benefits, perform PoCs at our labs, and help with implementation.
The success or failure of businesses often depends on how well organizations use their data assets for competitive advantage. Deeper insights from data require better information technology. As organizations modernize their IT infrastructure to boost innovation rather than limit it, they need a data storage system that can keep pace with highly virtualized environments, cloud computing, mobile and social systems of engagement, and in-depth, real-time analytics. Making the correct decision on storage investment is critical. Organizations must have enough storage performance and agility to innovate as they need to implement cloud-based IT services, deploy virtual desktop infrastructure, enhance fraud detection, and use new analytics capabilities. At the same time, future storage investments must lower IT infrastructure costs while helping organizations to derive the greatest possible value from their data assets. The IBM® FlashSystem V9000 is the premier, fully integrated, Tier 1, all-flash offering from IBM. It has changed the economics of today's data center by eliminating storage bottlenecks. Its software-defined storage features simplify data management, improve data security, and preserve your investments in storage. The IBM FlashSystem® V9000 SAS expansion enclosures provide new tiering options with read-intensive SSDs or nearline SAS HDDs. IBM FlashSystem V9000 includes IBM FlashCore® technology and advanced software-defined storage available in one solution in a compact 6U form factor. IBM FlashSystem V9000 improves business application availability. It delivers greater resource utilization so you can get the most from your storage resources, and achieve a simpler, more scalable, and cost-efficient IT Infrastructure. This IBM Redbooks® publication provides information about IBM FlashSystem V9000 Software V7.7 and introduces the recently announced V7.8. It describes the product architecture, software, hardware, and implementation, and provides hints and tips. It illustrates use cases and independent software vendor (ISV) scenarios that demonstrate real-world solutions, and also provides examples of the benefits gained by integrating the IBM FlashSystem storage into business environments. This book offers IBM FlashSystem V9000 scalability concepts and guidelines for planning, installing, and configuring, which can help environments scale up and out to add more flash capacity and expand virtualized systems. Port utilization methodologies are provided to help you maximize the full potential of IBM FlashSystem V9000 performance and low latency in your scalable environment. This book is intended for pre-sales and post-sales technical support professionals, storage administrators, and anyone who wants to understand how to implement this exciting technology.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication captures several of the preferred practices and describes the performance gains that can be achieved by implementing the IBM FlashSystem® 9100. These practices are based on field experience. This book highlights configuration guidelines and preferred practices for the storage area network (SAN) topology, clustered system, back-end storage, storage pools and managed disks, volumes, remote copy services, and hosts. It explains how you can optimize disk performance with the IBM System Storage® Easy Tier® function. It also provides preferred practices for monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting. This book is intended for experienced storage, SAN, IBM FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller and Storwize® administrators and technicians. Understanding his book requires advanced knowledge of these environments. Important, IBM FlashSystem 9200: On 11th February 2020 IBM announced the arrival of the IBM FlashSystem 9200 to the family. This book was written specifically for IBM FlashSystem 9100, however most of the general principles will apply to the IBM FlashSystem 9200. If you are in any doubt as to their applicability to the FlashSystem 9200 then you should work with your local IBM representative. This book will be updated to include FlashSystem 9200 in due course.
The focus of this Blueprint is to demonstrate how IBM FlashSystem® with IBM Spectrum® Virtualize can be used as a preferred back-end persistent storage for VMware Tanzu-based deployments. This document describes the use of IBM® FlashSystem storage volumes as virtual volumes (vVols) that are made available to provision persistent volumes for a VMware Tanzu deployment. All models of IBM FlashSystem family are supported by this document, including: FlashSystem 9100 and 9200 FlashSystem 7200 FlashSystem 5000 IBM SAN Volume Controller All storage that is running IBM Spectrum Virtualize software By using IBM Spectrum Connect VASA provider with IBM Spectrum Virtualize, the vVols are used to create a data store under vCenter. Post provisioning of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes grid service (TKGS), the vVols data store is used to provision the persistent volumes for future applications that are deployed on the worker nodes.
