Benefits of the IBM Storwize V7000 Real-time Compression feature with VMware vsphere 5.5 A technical report Mandar J. Vaidya IBM Systems and Technology Group ISV Enablement January 2015 Copyright IBM Corporation, 2015
Table of contents Abstract... 3 Scope... 3 Introduction... 3 Prerequisites... 4 Introduction to IBM Storwize V7000 system... 4 Introduction to VMware vsphere... 5 IBM Real-time Compression... 7 IBM Real-time Compression technology overview... 7 What is new in the next generation of Storwize V7000 storage system for Real-Time Compression... 7 Planning for Real-time Compression... 8 Comprestimator utility... 9 Implementing Real-time compressed volumes on IBM Storwize V7000 storage system... 9 Configuring real-time compressed volumes... 10 Monitoring savings from real-time compressed volumes... 12 Benefits of real-time compressed volumes in a VMware virtualized environment... 13 VMware vsphere 5.5 virtual machines... 13 VMware VMmark benchmarks... 14 Benchmarking scores and latency for VMmark workloads... 16 Mail and Olio applications... 16 DVD Store 2 application... 16 Processor utilization comparison... 17 Database workload in a VMware virtualized environment... 18 Summary... 20 Appendix A: Test environment... 21 Appendix B: Resources... 22 Acknowledgements... 22 About the author... 22 Trademarks and special notices... 23 2
Abstract This white paper demonstrates how the second generation of IBM Storwize V7000 storage system with the enhanced IBM Real-time Compression feature enabled, can reduce the storage capacity needed for the primary data while improving application performance time. Real-time Compression can be used with VMware vsphere 5.5 to effectively decrease storage consumption of VMware virtual machines and the application data they contain. This paper introduces the enhanced Storwize V7000 Real-time Compression technology, outlines the performance of key application workloads, and describes the deployment strategy of Storwize V7000 Real-time Compression with VMware vsphere 5.5 The target audience for this paper is system and storage administrators looking to implement the Storwize V7000 Real-time Compression feature in VMware vsphere 5.5 environments. Scope This technical report: Discusses the enhanced IBM Storwize V7000 Real-time Compression feature and its configuration in VMware vsphere 5.5 environments. Discusses the benefits of the enhanced Storwize V7000 Real-time Compression feature. This technical report does not: Discuss the configuration of the IBM Storwize V7000 system and VMware vsphere 5.5. Discuss the configuration of the VMware VMmark benchmark. Introduction Industries continue to demand effective utilization of IT infrastructure including servers and storage without affecting the performance of the application. Server virtualization provides many benefits of using server resources effectively and this lead to its explosive adoption in today s data center. Many customers are taking benefits of server virtualization to effectively use server hardware resources, reducing management tasks. Similar to how VMware vsphere abstracts server resources from underline hardware, IBM Storwize V7000 abstracts storage volumes from underline physical storage resources to achieve storage virtualization and thus providing effective use of storage resources. Many organizations are facing enormous challenges in addressing primary storage growth where primary storage is growing by 30% to 60% and many consumers prefer data on primary disks instead of offloading it to tapes for faster access. The next generation of Storwize V7000 system introduces Real-time Compression using industry-first hardware compression acceleration with Intel QuickAssist Acceleration Technology. It provides dedicated processing power and greater throughput for compression. Storwize V7000 uses IBM Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) technology which is seamlessly integrated with its storage system software stack to compress data before writing it to disk resulting in up to 80% storage capacity savings (equals effectively five times more capacity out of the physical capacity installed in the system). The solution presented in this paper builds upon server virtualization from VMware and storage virtualization provided by the second generation of IBM Storwize V7000 system. Real-time compressed 3
volumes are implemented for VMware vsphere virtual machine data, including operating system (boot disk) and application data. Prerequisites This paper provides deployment and management guidelines for customers who are planning or have already decided to implement VMware vsphere 5.5 on the IBM Storwize V7000 system using Real-time Compression. Technology skills prerequisites VMware vcenter Server management and administrator VMware ESXi installation VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) Guest operating system installations in a VMware environment Storage subsystems and terminology Introduction to IBM Storwize V7000 system The IBM Storwize V7000 storage system provides block storage enhanced with enterprise-class features. The Storwize V7000 system can scale up to 504 drives per control enclosure. Additionally, up to four control enclosures can be clustered, allowing the Storwize V7000 to scale up to 1,056 drives. With the built-in storage virtualization, replication capabilities, and key VMware storage integrations, the IBM Storwize V7000 system is great fit for VMware deployments. Figure 1: IBM Storwize V7000 Storage system 4
IBM Storwize V7000 storage system enables customers to improve application flexibility, availability, responsiveness, and unmatched performance while reducing complexity and reducing storage space and the following features: Clustered systems: The clustering ability of Storwize V7000 system enables growth from the smallest configurations up to systems with 1,056 drives for both performance and capacity. Data replication: Metro Mirror and Global Mirror performs synchronous and asynchronous data replication between Storwize V7000 systems at varying distances to protect data and keep services online in disaster situations. IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager: The IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager functionality enables the creation of instant volumes of copies for data protection and flexibility Advanced storage tiering with IBM Easy Tier : Advanced technology for automatically migrating data between different storage tiers based on real time usage and analysis. New generation GUI: Easy-to-use data management designed with graphical user interface (GUI) and point-and-click system management capabilities. The IBM Storwize V7000 system is a modular storage system built from the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller technology base and uses the Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) technology from the IBM System Storage DS8000 family to deliver a virtualized, easy to use, enterpriseready, mid-range storage solution. For additional information about IBM Storwize V7000, refer to the following URL: ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/storwize_v7000/index.html Introduction to VMware vsphere VMware vsphere is a virtualization platform capable of transforming a traditional data center, consisting of industry-standard hardware, into a shared mainframe-like environment. Through the use of virtualization technology, hardware resources are abstracted into pools which might be allocated to a variety of workloads. VMware vsphere is the core enabling technology of VMware s software-defined environment. The component of VMware vsphere can be categorized into three categories: Infrastructure services, application services, and the VMware vcenter Server. Figure 2 shows representation of VMware vsphere platform and various components which are associated with it. Infrastructure services Infrastructure services perform the virtualization of server hardware, storage, and network resources. The services within the infrastructure services category are the foundation of the VMware vsphere platform. They can be categorized in to the following types: VMware vcompute, which includes the VMware capabilities that abstract away from underlying disparate server resources. vcompute services aggregate these resources across many discrete servers and assign them to applications. VMware vstorage, which is the set of technologies that enables the most efficient use and management of storage in virtual environments. 5
VMware vnetwork, which is the set of technologies that simplify and enhance networking in virtual environments. Figure 2: VMware vsphere platform Application services The components categorized as application services addresses availability, security, and security concerns for all the applications running on the vsphere platform, regardless of the complexity of the application. VMware vcenter Server VMware vcenter Server provides a single point of control of the data center. It provides essential data center services such as access control, performance monitoring, and configuration. VMware vcenter scales to provide management of large enterprises consisting of 1000s of hosts and 10000s of virtual machines from a single server. 6
Clients Users can access the VMware vsphere data center through clients such as the vsphere Client or web access through a web browser using vcenter web client. IBM Real-time Compression IBM Real-time Compression technology takes storage efficiency to a new level using state-of-art technology, which is designed to improve efficiency by compressing data up to 80%. It enables users to store data up to five times as much data in the same physical disks without affecting performance. IBM Real-time Compression technology overview IBM Real-time Compression is seamlessly integrated in Storwize V7000 using Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) technology to compress incoming host writes before they are committed to the disk. IBM Real-time Compression uses the industry-standard LZ compression algorithms. It uses a technique called random access to read or write specific blocks of compressed data. This ensures that only blocks that require read or modification are accessed, and updates to data can be completed with no disruptions to other blocks in a compressed volume. What is new in the next generation of Storwize V7000 storage system for Real-Time Compression The next generation of Storwize V7000 storage system control enclosure is of the same size as that of the previous enclosure. However, back layout is re-designed to make room for more powerful canisters. Figure 3: Next generation IBM Storwize V7000 canisters 7
New Storwize V7000 model has one on-board compression accelerator standard and supports volume compression without any standard adaptor installed. This configuration will have a pass-through adaptor in slot to allow the on-board compression hardware to be used. As shown in Figure 3, one additional compression accelerator card can optionally be installed in slot 1, replacing the pass-through adaptor, for a total of two compression accelerator cards per node canisters. In order to support additional memory for Real-time Compression, an additional 32 GB of random access memory (RAM) is supported in each canister. Table 1 shows typical RAM allocation in a configuration where Real-time Compression is enabled. Installed RAM Real-time Compression RAM allocation Table 1: RAM allocation for Real-time Compression 32 GB 6 GB 64 GB 6 GB + Optional 32 GB upgrade Also, in order to support additional processing power requirements for Real-time Compression, processor cores are allocated appropriately. Table 2 shows processor core allocation when Real-time Compression is enabled. Real-time compression disabled Real-time compression enabled Storwize operations Real-time Compression Storwize operations Real-time Compression 8 0 4 4 Table 2: Processor core allocation for Real-time Compression This gives a balanced configuration between Real-time Compression and other Storwize operations. Recommendations for Real-time Compression usage: Install the optional cache upgrade to systems using Real-time Compression. Install the optional second compression accelerator card to systems using Real-time Compression Planning for Real-time Compression Customers should be aware that Real-time Compression might not benefit some applications or data types. Real-time Compression is designed to work with random access data such as: Database environments DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL, and so on Database Applications SAP, Oracle applications, and so on Server/Desktop Virtualization KVM, VMware, Hyper-V, and so on Other compressible workloads seismic, engineering, and so on IBM offers a host-based utility called Comprestimator that can analyze existing volumes and provide a very accurate estimation of compression savings for the data in the volumes analyzed. 8
Comprestimator utility The Comprestimator utility uses advanced mathematical and statistical algorithms to perform the sampling and analysis process in a very short and efficient way. This utility is designed to run on a block volume and it can run on a single file as well. The utility runs on a host that has access to the devices that can be analyzed, and performs only read operations so it has no effect whatsoever on the data stored on the device. It estimates portion of non-zero blocks in the volume and compression rates of non-zero blocks. The utility also displays its accuracy level by showing the maximum error range of the results achieved based on the formula it uses. Figure 4 shows a sample output of the Comprestimator utility. Figure 4: Sample output of Comprestimator utility By using this utility, customers can determine the data that can be a good candidate for Real-time Compression. For additional information, refer to the following website: ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/comprestimator/home.html Implementing Real-time compressed volumes on IBM Storwize V7000 storage system In order to use the Real-time Compression feature, customers must acquire a Real-time Compression license. After getting it enabled, Real-time Compression feature can be used to create compressed volumes. Compressed volumes are similar to thin-provisioned volumes and they have virtual, real, and used capacities. You need to consider the following guidelines for creating compressed volumes Real capacity is the extent space that is allocated from the storage pool. The real capacity is also set when the volume is created and, similar to thin-provisioned volumes, can be expanded or shrunk down to the used capacity. Virtual capacity is available to hosts. The virtual capacity is set when the volume is created and can be expanded or shrunk afterward. Used capacity is the amount of real capacity used to store customer data and metadata after compression. Capacity before compression is the amount of data that has been written to the volume and then compressed. The capacity before compression does not include regions where zero data is written to unallocated space. 9
Configuring real-time compressed volumes Real-time compressed volumes can be created using Storwize V7000 system web-based management GUI or command-line interface (CLI). 1. In order to create a new compressed volume, log in to the Storwize V7000 management GUI, select Volumes and then click Create Volume. Figure 5: Browse to Volumes and then Create Volume 2. Select a preset as Compressed, select a pool and enter the necessary information in the Volume Details section, and then click Create to create a new compressed volume. Figure 6: Create a compressed volume 3. After successful creation, the compressed volume shows the compressed icon (as shown in the Figure 7) to categorize the compressed volumes on the system. 10
Figure 7: Compressed volumes display After completing host mapping, a VMware VMFS datastore was created at the respective VMware ESX host. The datastore was used to store virtual machine disk (VMDK) files. IBM Storwize V7000 system is a virtualized storage system. In Storwize V7000 system, volumes can be converted between the different types of volumes, including: generic, thin provisioned, and compressed by using the volume mirroring feature without disrupting the host and application activity. 4. In order to convert a generic volume to a compressed volume, right click a generic volume and click Volume Copy Actions Add Mirrored Copy. Figure 8: Starting the volume copy operation 5. Select Compressed as the Volume Type, destination pool, and then click Add Copy to create a compressed copy of a generic volume. Figure 9: Selecting the volume type and the destination pool to add the mirrored copy 11
After successfully adding a mirrored copy, multiple copies of a volume are displayed. Figure 10: Displaying multiple copies of a volume after adding a mirrored copy. Real-time Compression is seamless to vsphere hosts, and therefore, there are no special implementation steps required for VMware vsphere data to benefit from Real-time Compression. Monitoring savings from real-time compressed volumes Compressed volumes are similar to thin-provisioned volumes. Capacity is allocated as needed. However, with compressed volumes, the consumed capacity is compressed. In order to view the compression savings, right-click the volume and click Properties. Figure 11: Compressed volume properties Figure 11 displays the detailed information of a compressed volume copy and the following points provide an overview of the items found in the capacity section: Used the amount of real size that is used to store data for the volume, which is sometimes called compressed size Before Compression the size of all the data that has been written to the volume calculated as though it was written without compression 12
Compression Savings the amount of capacity (in percentage) that is saved by using compression Real the amount of space from the storage pool allocated to allow the volume data to be stored Total the capacity of the volume that is available to hosts Benefits of real-time compressed volumes in a VMware virtualized environment For this technical paper, three workloads and their corresponding data were used to measure the effective compression and the performance achieved with Storwize V7000 Real-time Compression. It is important to note that benchmarking utilities that generate synthetic workloads do not provide valid results with compressed volumes. For more information on Real-time Compression benchmarking and best practices, refer to Real-time Compression in SAN Volume Controller and Storwize V7000 from IBM Redbooks at: ibm.com/redbooks.nsf/redpieceabstracts/redp4859.html?open The three workloads that were used for this lab validation are outlined in the following sections. VMware vsphere 5.5 virtual machines In a vsphere 5.5 environment, each virtual machine has an installed operating system which is stored in a VMware VMDK file. VMDK files can be stored on a Network File System (NFS) mount point or within a Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastore residing on a block storage volume such as those provided by Storwize V7000. Along with the operating system VMDK file, the minimum files for a virtual machine include a configuration (.vmx) file and various log files. Real-time Compression is enabled at the Storwize V7000 volume level. So, in a vsphere 5.5 environment, all virtual machines and data stored within a VMFS datastore that resides on a Storwize V7000 volume is compressed. This includes operating system files, installed applications, and any other data. Lab validation testing was performed to analyze the compressibility of virtual machines running two popular server operating systems. The details of the virtual machines are as follows: Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition Thin provisioned 50 GB VMDK Base operating system files only Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 (64bit) Thin provisioned 16 GB VMDK Base operating system files only The test was performed by cloning each virtual machine to its own compressed VMFS datastore. 13
Table 3 illustrates the compressibility of each virtual machine. Operating system Capacity used before compression (in GB) Capacity used after compression (in GB) Compression savings (in percentage) Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 35.56 19.4 45.43% Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 (64bit) 10.5 4.82 54.12% Table 3: Compression savings with VMware virtual machines It is expected that many virtual machines would be deployed on a VMFS datastore. A second lab test was performed to measure the impact of deploying multiple virtual machines on a single compressed VMFS datastore. The same base virtual machine images were used from the previous test, and each virtual machine was cloned four times to create a total of 10 virtual machines on a single VMFS datastore. Table 4 illustrates the measured capacity savings by deploying the virtual machines on a compressed VMFS datastore. Virtual machines Capacity used before compression (in GB) Capacity used after compression (in GB) Compression savings (in percentage) Windows 2008 R2 and Red Hat Linux 6.5 46.04 24.02 47.43% Table 4: Compression savings by deploying multiple VMware virtual machines on a compressed datastore This testing demonstrates that virtual machines running Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are highly compressible, with an average compressibility of 47%. VMware VMmark benchmarks VMware s VMmark is a free tool from VMware to measure the performance and scalability of applications running in a virtualized environment. VMmark generates a realistic measure of platform performance by incorporating a variety of platform-level workloads in addition to traditional application-level workloads. It is designed to benchmark the performance of the virtualization software and hardware. VMmark calls a unit of work for a benchmark as a tile. It is collection of virtual machines running a set of diverse workloads. The total number of VMmark tiles that a multi-host platform can accommodate gives a coarse-grain measure of that platform's consolidation capacity. VMmark includes following workloads: Mail server load simulation using Microsoft Exchange 2007 application Web 2.0 load simulation using Olio application E-commerce load simulation using DVD Store 2 application The workloads chosen for use in VMmark are representative of popular applications commonly run by VMware customers. 14
For more details on VMmark benchmark, refer VMmark benchmarking guide at: http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/overview In the lab setup, two types of Storwize V7000 systems were used to show the comparison between the first and second generation of Storwize V7000 family systems. Fully allocated non-compressed volumes were used with the first generation of Storwize system this volume configuration achieves the best performance results on the first generation Storwize V7000 systems. Second generation of Storwize V7000 system made use of compressed volumes. 1TB of RAID5 volume is used on both first and second generation of Storwize V7000 systems. Four ESX servers with each server consisting of one tile were used to run VMmark benchmarks. For each benchmark run, four tiles were used. Each test was run for two hours and benchmark results were gathered from both VMmark output and Storwize systems. Figure 12 shows the lab topology used for running VMmark benchmarks against first generation of Storwize V7000 with non-compressed volumes and second generation of Storwize V7000 with compressed volumes. Following sections list the observations made during the benchmarking runs. Figure 12: Lab topology used for VMmark benchmark 15
Benchmarking scores and latency for VMmark workloads For the purpose of analysis, average for benchmarking scores, and latency over all four tiles were considered. Mail and Olio applications For the Mail server application workload and Web 2.0 workload using Olio web applications, it shows negligible difference between the benchmarking scores for first and second generation of Storwize V7000. Also, latency measured in terms of quality of service (QoS) was almost the same between both the generations of Storwize V7000. Figure 13 shows the graphical comparison of scores and latency observed for Mail and Olio web applications. Figure 13: Benchmarking scores and latency for Mail and OIio web applications DVD Store 2 application For e-commerce simulation workload using DVD Store 2 application, it shows 30% improvement in the benchmarking scores for second generation with compressed volumes over the first generation with non-compressed volumes of Storwize V7000. 16
Latency observed in terms of QoS was reduced by 35% on the second generation with compression over the first generation of Storwize V7000 without compression. Figure 14 shows the graphical comparison of scores and latency for the DVD Store 2 application. Figure 14: Benchmarking scores and latency for DVD Store 2 application Processor utilization comparison In the second generation of Storwize V7000, it is possible to dedicate a set of processors for compression and other processors are available for supporting I/O requests and for various functions available under copy services. With a higher number of available processors, the second generation of Storwize V7000 system is seamlessly able to support I/O operations without impacting the native volumes performance with compression enabled. Figure 15 shows the CPU utilization comparison between the first and second generation systems. 17
Figure 15: CPU utilization comparison Database workload in a VMware virtualized environment For showing Real-time Compression advantages in a virtualized environment carrying database workload, two types of Storwize V7000 systems were used to show the comparison between the first and the second generation of Storwize V7000 family systems. The improvements in the second generation of Storwize V7000 (Gen 2) systems related to the compression component are designed to be used with active primary data such as production databases and at the same time, it allocates the systems resources in such a way that the non-compressed workloads do not suffer any performance penalties. While fully allocated volumes were used with the first generation of Storwize systems, Gen 2 systems made use of compressed volumes. Three VMware ESX servers hosting three database virtual machines had been used in the benchmark testing. The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmark TPCC was carried out using a set of nine VMs as clients running benchmark factory software. A total of 15,000 virtual users were spread across all VMs. The benchmark factory server and nine (9) other VMs were hosted on separate VMware ESX server. Each test was run for one hour and performance results were gathered from both Storwize systems and benchmark factory server. For detailed topology and benchmarking performed and results, refer technical paper ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/contenthandler/stg_ast_sto_wp_ibm-storwize-v7000-real-timecompression-oracle 18
From the database benchmarking results on a VMware virtualized environment, following improvements were observed on second generation of Storwize V7000 with real-time compressed volumes with respect to first generation of Storwize V7000 without compressed volumes. Three times faster response time Five times faster in virtual disk (vdisk) read latency Four times faster managed disk (mdisk) response time Three time less managed disk (MDisk) write operations (compression reduces back-end I/O load, making the system more efficient, thus delivering better performance) With a higher number of processors, second generation of Storwize V7000 system is seamlessly able to support I/O activity with compression enabled 19
Summary The IBM Real-time Compression integrated with the IBM Storwize V7000 storage system, can be used to effectively reduce the storage capacity required for many types of data. The patented algorithms implemented in the RACE technology of the Real-time Compression feature allow data to be compressed in real-time without affecting the application s performance. Real-time Compression is fully transparent to hosts and applications, and the performance and compression rates are consistent over time. Second generation of IBM Storwize V7000 storage systems with the additional hardware compression acceleration cards, cache memory, and processor resources allocated for Real-time Compression dramatically increased the performance of the system when using compression. The hardware has been designed and purposely built to support enterprise primary applications performance. VMware vsphere virtual machines can be seamlessly deployed on the compressed volumes, often with the compression savings of 50% to75%, allowing customers to reduce the storage capacity required for virtualized environments. The results obtained during the tests show that with the second generation of Storwize V7000 using Real-time Compression is similar and at times outperform the results of the Storwize V7000 non-compressed systems. 20
Appendix A: Test environment The following information provides details about the test environment used for testing the solution. IBM Storwize V7000 : 7.4 VMware ESX Version : 5.5 VMware VMmark benchmarking tool : 2.5 21
Appendix B: Resources The following websites provide useful references to supplement the information contained in this paper: IBM Systems on PartnerWorld ibm.com/partnerworld/systems IBM Redbooks ibm.com/redbooks IBM Publications Center www.elink.ibmlink.ibm.com/public/applications/publications/cgibin/pbi.cgi?cty=us IBM Storwize V7000 Knowledge Center ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/st3fr7/landing/v7000_welcome.html VMware 5.5 Documentation Center www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html VMware VMmark benchmark overview www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/overview Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Itay Raviv and Alex Ulstein for running the VMmark benchmark tests. About the author Mandar J. Vaidya is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in IBM ISV Enablement group. He has more than 15 years of experience working with various storage and systems technologies. Mandar holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Pune, India. You can reach Mandar at mandar.vaidya@in.ibm.com. 22
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