Setup and Configuration of the AGLT2 MD3600i - July 25, 2011

This details our installation and configuration of our new MD3600i (UMVMSTOR02) plus MD1200 shelf. We received both units on July 22, 2011 and both were installed in Rack4-2 at 31-34 U. A diagram on the network and power connections is shown in this figure:

• UMVMSTOR02 power and network connectivity diagram:
  

In addition to the physical setup there were a number of additional configuration details to attend to:

• Setup of storage and associated LUNS
• Creation of Host Groups to manage shared access via iSCSI
• Integration with AGLT2's VMware system

There are some useful documents that describe most of the details:

• MD3600i Deployment Guide
• MD3600i Owner's Manual
• MD3600i VMware Deployment Guide
• MD3600i Best Tuning-Practices Guide
• VMware 4.1 iSCSI Configuration Guide

A number of items were configured to optimize our setup for use with VMware. Summarizing them:

• Made sure we had the most recent firmware installed (it arrived with the most recent)
• All ESX hosts, switches and the MD3600i were configured to use jumbo frames of 9000 bytes
• The ESX hosts had a VMkernel device "bound" to each of the available 10GE nics (vmnic12 and vmnic13)
  • This is done via CLI or vCenter Client: just make sure that for each of the two iSCSI port groups there is only 1 NIC active and all others are under Unused.
  • Check status of the software iSCSI configuration via

    esxcli swiscsi nic list -d vmhba38

• Made sure the MD3600i is recognized by VMware. On each ESX host do:

  • esxcli nmp satp addrule -v DELL -M MD36xxi -s VMW_SATP_LSI

• The MD3600i had the following disk groups created:
  • Three AFS disk groups, each RAID-10 and enclosure redundant (4 disks each): AFS_vicep[e|f|g]
  • Two VM images disk groups, each RAID-5 (5 disks each): VMImages and VMImages2
• The "High-performance Tier" and "Snapshot and Disk Copy" licenses were loaded on the MD3600i
• We installed Dell's MD VMware plugin in our vCenter which allows easier management of the iSCSI system
  • Note this is available from the regular support/downloads area for the MD3600i
• Enabled the ESX hosts access to the relevant disk-groups and LUNs on MD3600i via the Dell MD plugin
  • Setup host-group VMware_AGLT2 with UMVM01/02/03 as members
• Created VMFS 3.46 datastores for AFS_vicep[e|f|g] and VMImages/VMImages2 from UMVM01 are rescanning
• Rescanned iSCSI on all ESX hosts
• All ESX hosts had their storage adapters configured to use "Round-Robin" path selection on all iSCSI targets
• Forced all disk-groups back to their preferred controllers
• The VMImages and AFS_vicepf areas are served via controller #1 while the rest are service via #0

-- ShawnMcKee - 25 Jul 2011