As part of our commitment to expanding vSAN solutions, we invited Murray Oldfield of InterSystems here to share his highly reviewed blog post about HCI and vSAN. Murray is a Technology Architect at InterSystems, focusing on defining solution architectures and identifying platform improvements that benefit customers.
This article was first posted in November 2016 on InterSystems Developer Community to guide users of InterSystems database platform with planning for HCI and more specifically vSAN. The article starts with an orientation to HCI and then a walk-through of vSAN configuration choices and recommendations.
While there is reference to InterSystems database technology in this article the discussion and recommendations provide context to vSAN configuration for any database or Tier–1 business critical application deployed on vSAN.
Some applications are too important to fail. They support our healthcare systems, businesses, and governments. Health. Prosperity. Society. These are things that matter.
InterSystems products including InterSystems Caché databases are designed around the idea that lives and livelihoods depend on them to work properly and reliably. It’s easy to see how this applies in healthcare, where InterSystems technology supports the health records of more than 450 million people worldwide. But it’s equally true in other industries. In financial services, for example, InterSystems-based applications support livelihoods by processing 15% of the world’s equity trades every day.
While hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) promises simplified management there are configuration choices to make to ensure reliable deployment of Tier–1 business critical applications.
At the heart of vSAN is software-defined technology and the article concentrates on database-centric explanations and recommendations for storage capacity planning including;
vSAN storage model, Storage tiers and IO performance planning, and then moves on to storage policy-based management (SPBM). It also highlights combinations of capabilities, including;
- Deduplication and compression
- For Caché database deployments do not enable compression and deduplication.
- Failures to Tolerate (FTT)
- A vSAN cluster running Caché must have a minimum four hosts for availability.
- Erasure coding
- For production databases do not enable erasure coding. Enable for non-production.
- Striping
- For production databases do not enable striping.
- Object space reservation
- For production database disks use 100% reservation.
The article recommends all-flash storage for vSAN and includes an overview of flash storage choices today and in the near future.
