Free Book - vSphere on NetApp Best Practices

I’m pleased to announce that NetApp is giving away published copies of our vSphere on NetApp Storage Best Practices book! This offer is open to the first 1,000 eligible individuals who have a shipping address in the US or Canada. The vSphere on NetApp book has been extremely popular and now is your chance to scoop one for free! This is the same book currently available on Lulu.com for $15.99 plus shipping (USD).

If you are a NetApp customer or partner, run VMware on FAS, vSeries, or IBM N-Series arrays this book is the ‘how-to’ guide for implementing vSphere on NetApp. Below is the book's description from Lulu.

Ensure your VMware vSphere on NetApp deployment delivers the highest performance, functionality, and storage efficiencies. This book will cover all basis including ESX/ESXi storage connectivity with FC, iSCSI, FCoE, and NFS; and array configurations including data deduplication and optimal datastore/Virtual Machines layouts. The Second edition highlights new vStorage capabilities and integrations available to VI admins with the NetApp vCenter plug-ins.

The book registers at just under 26,000 words and runs 124 pages and the authors of book are employees of NetApp and Cisco.

 

The book has been a huge success since we published v1.0 for the bookstore at VMworld 2009. Since then it has sold over 6,600 copies and ranks 164 of books published by Lulu. Not too bad for a publication run of 11 months.

You can register for your free copy of VMware vSphere on NetApp Storage Best Practices here.

For those interested I’ve listed the Table of Contents below...

1 Introduction 5

1.0 Executive Summary 5

1.1 The Value of Multi-Protocol Storage Arrays 5

1.2 Implementing Best Practices 6

1.3 Intended Audience 7

1.4 About the Authors and Contributors 8

2 An Overview of VMware Storage Options 9

2.0 An Introduction to Storage in a Virtual Infrastructure 9

2.1 VMFS Datastores 10

2.2 NFS Datastores 12

2.3 SAN Raw Device Mappings 13

2.4 Datastore Comparison Tables 14

2.5 VMware Virtual Disk Formats 18

2.6 Increasing Storage Utilization 20

2.7 Storage Array Thin Provisioning 21

2.8 Storage Array Data Deduplication 22

3 Storage Network Design and Setup 24

3.0 SAN and NAS Storage Networking Basics 24

3.1 Fibre Channel Storage Networking Basics 24

3.2 Ethernet Storage Networking Basics 26

3.3 Cisco Nexus 1000v Distributed Virtual Switch Recommendations 31

3.4 Switching capabilities Determine the Storage Network Architecture 33

3.5 Storage Network Architecture with Multi-Switch Link Aggregation 34

3.6 Storage Network Architecture with Traditional Ethernet Switches 42

3.7 Enabling Multiple TCP Session Support for iSCSI 51

4 Storage Array Design and Setup 55

4.0 A New Operational Model - Provisioning Resource Pools 55

4.1 Storage Architecture Concepts 56

4.2 NetApp Storage Constructs 56

4.3 NetApp Array Configuration 58

4.4 Creating a Service Account for the VSC 61

4.5 Setting Storage Management Options for the RCU 63

5 vSphere Dynamic Storage Provisioning and Management 66

5.0 vCenter Based Storage Provisioning and Management 66

5.1 Installing the Virtual Storage Console 67

5.2 Adding Storage Controllers to the Virtual Storage Console 69

5.3 Optimal Storage Settings for ESX/ESXi Hosts 71

5.4 Installing the Rapid Cloning Utility 72

5.5 Adding Storage Controllers to the Rapid Cloning Utility 72

5.6 Assigning Storage Resources to the RCU 75

5.7 End to End Provisioning of Datastores in vCenter 76

5.8 Choosing a Virtual Machine Data Layout 79

5.9 Resizing Datastore Capacity in vCenter 83

5.10 Monitoring Datastore and Storage Array Capacity in vCenter 84

6 Virtual Machine Configuration and Optimal Settings 90

6.0 Windows VM File System Performance 90

6.1 Ensuring Optimum VM Availability 91

6.2 Ensuring Optimal Storage Performance 92

6.3 Ensuring VM Partition Alignment 93

6.4 Identifying Partition Alignment 93

6.5 Corrective Actions for VMs with Misaligned Partitions 94

6.6 Create Properly Aligned Partitions for New VMs 95

6.7 Adding Storage Capacity to a VM 96

7 Disk-Based Snapshot Backups for VMware 99

7.0 Complementary Snapshot Technologies 99

7.1 NetApp Snapshot Backups for vSphere 99

8 Technical Report Summary 100

Appendix A: Configuring SSH on ESX Servers and NetApp Arrays 101

Appendix B: MultiMode EtherChannels with Traditional Ethernet Switches 104

Appendix C: Creating an aligned VMDK with fdisk in ESX 105

Appendix D: Relocating the Pagefile in Windows VMs 106

Appendix E: Manually Growing VMFS Datastores 107

Appendix F: Manual Storage Configurations for FC, FCoE, and iSCSI 108

F1. Host Bus and Converged Network Adapters 108

F2. LUN sizing for VMFS Datastores 108

F3. Cluster Sizing Considerations when using LUNs 109

F4. NetApp iGroups (LUN Masking) 109

F5. FC, FCoE, and iSCSI LUN Provisioning 109

F6. Connecting FC and FCoE Datastores 111

F7. Connecting iSCSI Datastores 111

F8. Enable iSCSI Communications 112

F9. Connecting to iSCSI Targets 112

F10. Restricting iSCSI Targets to Preferred Interfaces 113

F11. VMware Native MultiPathing 114

F12. Default NMP Settings 114

F13. Enabling ALUA 114

F14. Default NMP Settings with ALUA Enabled 115

F15. Manually Configuring the Round Robin PSP 115

Appendix G: Manual Storage Configurations for NFS 118

G1. Increasing the number of NFS Datastores 118

G2. File System Security 118

G3. ESX NFS Timeout Settings 119

G1. NFS TCP Window size 119

G2. Connecting NFS Datastores 120

Appendix H: Manually Setting Volume Autogrow 121

Appendix I: Document References 122

Appendix J: Version Tracking 124

Comments

[daniel kaiser]

Is this for version 3.0 that covers VSC 2.0?

[Vaughn Stewart]

TR-3749 v2.0 includes all of the NetApp vCenter plug-ins.

[Ceri]

Disappointed to see .uk excluded :(

[Pras2k]

Do we get a free softcopy?

[BrettM]

You can find pretty much the exact same info from IBM as a Red Book, for free: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247871.html?Open