Thursday, May 31, 2012

VMware ESXi and HP 3PAR Storage

We recently added a new HP 3PAR F400 SAN to our existing VMware cluster.  If you haven't read about this SAN and are interested in SAN storage, I highly recommend you take a look at HP's site for more information: 3PAR Storage.

One thing I've found this SAN lacking in is documentation.  It's easy to find, but bits of information are scattered across several documents.  The HP implementation consultant handed me a thumb drive with 3GBs of data before he left, half of which are PDFs (to give you an idea).

The point of this post is to bring all of these bits together in one place to include settings and best practices for VMware ESXi 5.0 along with the relevant references.  Here's what I've found so far - I will continue to add and update settings as I find them where relevant:
ESXi Advanced Settings:
DiskMaxIOSize   = 128 (Source)
QFullSampleSize = 32  (Source)
QFullThreshold  = 4

Default Path Selection Policy (PSP) = VM_PSP_RR (Source and Powershell Tip)
IOPS = 1

LUN Size = As large as ESXi can handle, currently 2TB (Source)
VMDK format = Eager Zeroed Thick

VMs - zero-out free space (Source):
   For Windows = SDELETE (Download)
   For Linux = DD  (section 3.2.1 in source doc linked above)