Equallogic PS Series Firmware Version V5.1 Released
It’s a Early Production Access. Originally, I thought we need VMware vSphere 5.0 in order to use these great features, but apparently, it also works for vSphere 4.1 (Wrong, see update below). In additional, Dell is finally moving into Fluid Data Solution with Equallogic and Compellent products. (ie, moving hot-data to SSD/15K SAS tiers automatically)
Two of the major improvements are:
Support for VMware Thin Provision Stunning
Version 5.1 of the PS Series Firmware supports VMware’s Thin Provision Stunning feature. When thinly-provisioned volumes containing VMware virtual machines approach their in-use warning threshold, the PS Series Group alerts vCenter that the volume is low on space. When the volume reaches the maximum in-use threshold, the PS Series Group does not take the volume offline, which would cause the virtual machines to crash. Instead, vCenter stuns (ie, suspend) the virtual machines on the volume to prevent them from crashing. When additional volume space is created, either by growing the volume or moving virtual machines to other volumes, the administrator can resume the virtual machines.
Performance Load BalancingIn Version 5.1
Improvements have been made to the load balancing capabilities in PS Series groups. This enhancement is designed to provide sub-volume performance load balancing and tiering in both heterogeneous and homogeneous storage pool configurations. The load balancer detects pool member arrays that are at, or near, overload, and shifts some of the workload to less-loaded arrays. To ensure that the load balancing responses to long-term trends rather than brief increases in activity, the operation takes place gradually, over a period of hours. The result is improved performance balancing in pools, especially in pools containing mixed drive or RAID configurations. Mixed pools experience the greatest benefit with workloads that show tiering and are regular in their operating behavior.
Fix List v5.1:
- A problem with an internal management process may disrupt in-progress management commands. This issue affects arrays running version 5.0.4 or 5.0.5 of the PS Series Firmware. In rare circumstances, on arrays running version 5.0.5 Firmware, this may also result in a control module becoming temporarily unresponsive.
- Unplanned control module failovers may occur in multi-member groups running in environments in which VMware ESX version 4.1 with VAAI, the Host Integration Tools for Microsoft v3.5, or Host Integration Tools for VMware 3.0 are used. (This is serious!)
- In some cases, a controller failover occurred because of a drive error during a RAID rebuild.
- In some cases, the background drive scanning process encountered an error during drive testing, and the drive was reported as “faulted” and left online when it should have been marked failed” and removed from use. AND In rare cases, a failing drive in an array could not be correctly marked as failed. When this occurred, the system was unable to complete other I/O operations on group volumes until the drive was removed. This error affected PS3000, PS4000, PS5000X, PS5000XV, PS5500, PS6000, PS6010, PS6500, and PS6510 arrays running Version 5.0 of the PS Series Firmware. (Still haven’t fixed this since v5.04! So the Predicative Feature doesn’t work in reality.)
- A failure in a hot spare drive being used as the target in a drive mirroring operation could have resulted in the group member becoming unresponsive to user I/O.
- Connection load balancing could result in volume disconnects in VMware environments using the EqualLogic Multipath Extension Module. (You KIDDING ME right?)
Update Oct 26, 2011
I got the wrong impression VMware Thin Provision Stun Option will also work with the existing ESX 4.1 version before, so this means vSphere version need to be version 5.
vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) were first introduced with vSphere 4.1, enabling offload capabilities support for three primitives:
1. Full copy, enabling the storage array to make full copies of data within the array
2. Block zeroing, enabling the array to zero out large numbers of blocks
3. Hardware-assisted locking, providing an alternative mechanism to protect VMFS metadata
With vSphere 5.0, support for the VAAI primitives has been enhanced and additional primitives have been introduced:
• vSphere® Thin Provisioning (Thin Provisioning), enabling the reclamation of unused space and monitoring of space usage for thin-provisioned LUNs
• Hardware acceleration for NAS
• SCSI standardization by T10 compliancy for full copy, block zeroing and hardware-assisted locking
When I am browsing through PS6100XV detail (http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/equallogic-ps6100xs/pd), I saw the followings:
“Thin Provisioning Awareness: With VMware® Thin Provisioning awareness for vSphere™ v4.1, you can mitigate your risk of data loss and facilitate graceful data recovery.”
It’s really confusing now, so can we or can we not be able to use the new vSphere Thin Provisioning Stun working on ESX 4.1 with EQL FW 5.1 or above?