Network and Storage Protocols

FAS2040 best practices question

borismekler
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Or two of them, actually.

Background - I'm preparing to migrate from a dual controller FAS2020 with 12x300GB drives to a dual controller FAS2040 with no internal drives and 24x300GB drives in a DS4243. Migration will be performed by moving the 12 internal drives into the empty FAS2040 chassis according to this procedure. The FAS2020 is currently configured with 1 controller owning 10 drives, 9 of them in a single RAID-DP aggregate, and the other controller owning 2 drives in a RAID4 aggregate. End result, immediately after the migration, I'll have my old network settings, 25 spare drives total, and 2 unconfigured NICs per controller. The system provides (and will continue to do so) NFS access to vSphere hosts, CIFS access to IIS web farms, and iSCSI LUNs to MSSQL and Exchange (100% virtual). Right now, on the FAS2020, e0a and e0b are configured into static multimode VIFs, with each controller plugged into a separate switch (switches don't support stacking, so I can't go across). iSCSI is using a single path to that VIF address.

What I'm planning for the new box:

  1. Networking. Change the VIF from static multimode to single mode, and plug e0a/e0b into separate switches. This will give me switch failure resiliency. Plug e0c into one switch, e0d into another, configure them into separate VLANs that don't communicate across switches. On the vSphere hosts, configure two extra vSwitches, each with one physical NIC and a VM port group assigned the proper VLAN tag. Each VM that needs iSCSI access gets two vNICs, one in each of those networks, and MPIO is configured.
  2. Disks. After the upgrade is complete, assign all 24 disks in the DS4243 shelf to 2nd controller and create a new aggregate using 23 disks, RG size 23. Migrate the root volume there and delete the old RAID4 aggregate. Give the two freed up disks to the first controller, expand its aggregate from 9 to 11 disks. Use storage VMotion to migrate most of the VMDKs (there's about 1.5TB total, pre-ASIS) to the second controller. End result, first controller will own all 12 internal drives with 9 data, 2 parity and 1 spare, while second controller will own all 24 external drives, with 21 data, 2 parity and 1 spare. Come next upgrade, in 4-6 years' time, even if it will turn out to be impossible to move the first controller's internal drives to a new home, migrating the second one (with most of the data) should be as simple as plugging the shelf into a new head.
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