Getting
Started with StorMagic SvSAN - A Product Review
Recently, I had the
opportunity to try out StorMagic SvSAN in my home lab to see how it stacks up.
The following is an introduction to SvSAN, a description of the deployment,
testing, testing results and my findings.
What
is StorMagic SvSAN 6.2?
StorMagic SvSAN
provides a Hyperconverged solution that has been designed with the remote
office/branch office in mind. Two host nodes with onboard storage can be
utilized in a shared storage style deployment in locations where a traditional
3 tiered architecture would prove to be difficult to manage or too cost
prohibitive. SvSAN is vendor agnostic so
it can be deployed onto existing infrastructure without the need to acquire
additional hardware. The two storage nodes can scale out to support up to 64
compute-only nodes. Licensing is straight forward: perpetual license per pair
of clustered storage nodes as one license per pair. Initial pricing is also
very accessible, starting at approximately $4,000 for the first 2TB license.
Licensing and capacity can scale beyond the initial 2TB.
When asked about
their typical customer base, StorMagic provided the following response: "StorMagic SvSAN is designed for large
organizations with thousands of sites and companies running small data centers
that require a highly available, two-server solution that is simple,
cost-effective and flexible. Our typical customers have distributed IT
operations in locations like retail stores, branch offices, factories,
warehouses and even wind farms and oil rigs. It is also perfect for IoT
projects that require a small IT footprint, and the uptime and performance
necessary to process large amounts of data at the edge."
Technical
Layout of SvSAN
A typical SvSAN
deployment consists of the following base components: hypervisor integration,
Virtual Storage Appliances, Neutral Storage Host. In my lab environment, I used
VMware vSphere, but StorMagic does offer support for Hyper-V as well. A plugin
is loaded into the vCenter Server and provides the dashboard for management and
deploying the VSAs. Following the wizard, a Virtual Storage Appliance is
deployed on each host and the local storage is presented to the VSA. Before
creating storage pools the witness service (Neutral Storage Host) must be
deployed external to the StorMagic cluster. The NSH can be deployed on a
server, Windows PC, or Linux. It is light weight enough that it can run on a
Raspberry Pi.
SvSAN 6.2 introduced
the ability to encrypt data. A key management server is required for
encryption. For this evaluation, I installed Fornetix Key Orchestration as the
KMS. Encryption options available include encryption of a new datastore,
encryption of an existing datastore, re-keying a datastore, and decrypting the
datastore. As I was curious to as what kind of performance hit encryption may
have against the environment, I ran my tests against the non-encrypted
datastore, then again after encrypting it.
Deployment
and Testing
The overall
installation process is fairly straight forward. StorMagic provides an
Evaluators guide which outlines the installation process, and their website has
ample documentation for the product. I had to read through the documentation a
couple of times to fully understand the nuances of the deployment. I did
encounter a few hiccups during deployment, one IP issue which I resolved and a
timeout on the VSA deployment. I did need to contact support to release the
license for the Virtual Storage Appliance which timed out, but support was
responsive and resolved my issue quickly. The timeout may have been tied to the
IP issue as the VSA deployed successfully on the second attempt.
With the underlying
infrastructure in place, a shared datastore was deployed across both host
nodes. Now the testing could begin. A Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machine
was deployed on the SvSAN datastore to run performance testing against. The
provided Evaluation Guide gives many suggested tests to put the SvSAN
environment through its paces. As I mentioned previously, I ran the tests
against an encrypted datastore, a non-encrypted datastore, and a local
datastore.
Following the
guidelines set forth by the Evaluation Guide, Iometer was the tool of choice
for performance benchmarking. Below is a chart of the metrics used. Outside of
the suggested performance testing I also ran various tests to see what the end
user experience could feel like on a SvSAN backed server. These tests included
RDP session into the VM, continuously pinging locations internal and external
to the network, and running various applications.
The final tests ran
against the SvSAN cluster included failure scenarios and how it would impact
the virtual machine. Drives were removed, connectivity to the Neutral Storage
Host was severed, iSCSI & cluster networking were removed. An interesting aspect
to the guide is that it gives you testing options to cause failures that will
affect VMs running on the SvSAN datastore so you can see first-hand how the
systems will handle the loss of storage.
SvSAN
Results & Final Thoughts
Performance testing
ran against the VM on the SvSAN datastore provided positive results. I was
curious as to whether passing through an additional step in the process would
affect IOPS, but there were only nominal differences between the local storage
and the SvSAN datastore. I found the same to be true when it came to running an
encrypted versus a non-encrypted datastore. IOPS performance held steady across
all testing scenarios.
The same was true
with the user experience performance testing. While running Iometer, Firefox, a
popular chat application, and pinging a website the following failures were
introduced to no impact:
- hard drives were remove
- a Virtual Storage Appliance
was powered down
- an ESXi host was shut down
- Connectivity to the Neutral
Storage host was severed
I was impressed with
my experience with StorMagic's SvSAN. From no prior exposure to running
production ready datastores in approximately an hour. The solution performed
well under duress. Overall, StorMagic SvSAN is an excellent choice for those in
need of a solid remote office/branch office solution that is reliable and cost
effective.
Lab
Technology Specifications:
- Two Dell R710s
- 24 GB RAM each
- 2x X5570 Xeon 2.93 GHz 8M Cache, Turbo, HT, 1333MHz CPU Each
- One 240 GB SSD drive for
caching in each host
- Presented as a single 240 GB
pool from the RAID controller
- 5 x 600 10k SAS drives
configured in RAID 5
- Presented as two pools;
400GB & 1.8 TB
- VMware vCenter Server
Appliance 6.5
- VMware ESXi 6.5 U2 Dell
Custom ISO
- Cisco Meraki MS220 1GB
Switching
Further reading on StorMagic:
SvSAN Lets You Go Sans SAN
This blog was originally published at Gestalt IT as a guest blog post.
If you'd like to continue the conversation about StorMagic SvSAN, do
not hesitate to contact me via any of the channels provided below. Do
you have an idea or a
topic for the blog? Would you like to be a guest on the ExploreVM
podcast? If so, please contact me on Twitter, Email, or Facebook.
