Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.31
vSphere 5.5 Storage IO Control settings.
vSphere Storage Policies and Storage DRS
With vSphere 5.x, we use Storage Policies and Storage DRS not only to reduce
management overheads in a vSphere environment but also to improve performance. By
using vSphere Storage Policies, you can take some of the guesswork out of provisioning
your SQL Servers. By creating policies that align to the IOPS per TB and protection or
availability requirements of your databases, it becomes very easy to provision new
databases to the correct storage to achieve their requirements. You can manually assign
storage capabilities to data stores and then create policies for those capabilities.
Alternatively, you can use a storage vendor provider that leverages the vSphere API for
Storage Awareness (VASA) to automatically provide visibility of the capabilities to
vSphere. With VASA, when LUNs are provisioned at the physical array, the
capabilities will flow through to vCenter. Storage Vendor Providers and storage
capabilities are then visible when creating data stores. This allows vSphere Storage
Administrators to easily include the correct storage into the correct data store, and this
can later be used to create data store clusters.
Figure 6.32
shows a virtual data center where there are three possible storage policies
that could be used based on the requirements of the SQL Server. You might choose Gold
or Silver for different production or test database systems and you might choose Bronze
for development databases. Your policies would be based on your particular
requirements. To make it easy to architect for storage performance, the IOPS per TB
should be known for each storage policy, and this should be communicated to all the key
stakeholders until it is clear what they are getting when they provision VMs.
