Virtualization Collaboration Storage Design Requirements

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Updated:February 17, 2017

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Virtualized Collaboration Storage Design Requirements

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Collaboration Virtualization Sizing

Introduction

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This page is intended to help you design a storage system when using any 3rd-party SAN/NAS storage arrays (including use with diskless UCS B-Series TRCs), specs-based DAS hardware (including UCS C-Series DAS configurations not aligned with a TRC) and Cisco HyperFlex. More detail is provided on GB and IOPS capacity planning to meet the requiremetns of Collaboration applications.

With Cisco Business Edition 6000/7000 appliances or any of the TRCs with DAS or HperFlex storage, the DAS configuration (e.g. disk technology, quantity, size, speed, RAID configuration) has already been properly designed to provide enough IOPS capacity and performance has been explicitly validated by Collaboration applications. Just follow the normal sizing rules described in Collaboration Virtualization Hardware and Sizing Guidelines such as CPU, memory, and storage capacity requirements.

IOPS Capacity and Performance Planning

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Knowing the IOPS (In/Out Operations per second) utilization of the Cisco Collaboration applications ahead of time will help you design a storage array that will meet the storage latency and performance requirements of Collaboration applications. To find information on the IOPS characterization for a specific Cisco Collaboration application, go the home page http://www.cisco.com/go/virtualized-collaboration, in the "At a Glance - Cisco Virtualization Support" section, click on that specific Collaboration application, and look for the "IOPS and Storage System Performance Requirements" section. IOPS requirements for the storage array is done by using the sum of Collaboration application VM's IOPS. Note that with DAS, addressing IOPS requirements may require higher disk/spindle counts, which may result in excess storage capacity beyond minimum needed for the Collaboration applications. The storage performance should be monitored so that the latency and storage performance requirements are met at all time.

Example

IOPS calculation example

In this example, the deployment includes CUCM, IM & Presence, Unity Connection. Assumptions: 12,000 users/devices, 4 BHCA per user, No CUCM CDR Analysis and Reporting, one application upgrade at a time, one application DRS backup at a time.

Design:

CUCM IOPS calculation PUB and TFTP nodes: Consider the total BHCA for the cluster for the purpose of sizing, 12,000 users x 4 BHCA = 48,000 BHCA. Subscriber nodes: 6,000 users per Subscriber pair, assuming 1:1 redundancy. So 24,000 BHCA per CUCM subscriber pair or an average of 12,000 BHCA per CUCM subscriber. From the IOPS characterization in the CUCM docwiki page, a CUCM node handling between 10k and 25k BHCA produces 50 IOPS. A CUCM node handling between 25k and 50k BHCA produces 100 IOPS. Hence the table below.

Number of Nodes BHCA per Node(for sizing purposes) IOPS per Node Total IOPS
CUCM Pub and TFTP 3 48,000 100 300 (93% - 98% writes)
CUCM subscriber pairs 4 12,000 50 200 (93% - 98% writes)

IM & Presence calculation

From the IOPS characterization in the IM & Presence docwiki page, IOPS are about 160 when using an OVA with more than 1,000 users.

Number of Nodes IOPS per Node Total IOPS
IM & Presence nodes 2 160 320

Unity Connection IOPS calculation

The IOPS characterization in the Unity Connection docwiki page provides information on the IOPS per node when using the 7 vCPU OVA, refer to the first data column below. We can then calculate the other numbers in the following columns.

IOPS type IOPS per node with the 7-vCPU OVA Additional IOPS per node during peaks Total IOPS for both nodes Addtional IOPS during peaks for both nodes
Avg Total 202 404
Peak Total 773 571 1546 1144
Avg Read 10 20
Peak Read 526 516 1052 1032
Avg Write 192 384
Peak Write 413 221 826 442

MediaSense IOPS calculation

Below are the details of the IOPS and disk utilization for 2vCPU (2 nodes), 4vCPU (2 nodes), and 7vCPU (5 nodes).

2 vCPU IOPS for version 11.0
Disks IOPS - Peak IOPS - 95% IOPS - Avg Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - Peak Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - 95% Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - Avg
OS Disk 70 65 50 1500 1200 800
DB Disk 45 30 15 800 250 150
Media Disk 60 55 35 2300 2100 1200
4 vCPU IOPS for version 11.0
Disks IOPS - Peak IOPS - 95% IOPS - Avg Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - Peak Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - 95% Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - Avg
OS Disk 125 90 65 3300 2100 1200
DB Disk 70 50 25 2000 750 450
Media Disk 175 160 135 5300 5100 4600
7 vCPU IOPS for version 11.0
Disks IOPS - Peak IOPS - 95% IOPS - Avg Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - Peak Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - 95% Disk Read/Write(kpbs) - Avg
OS Disk 80 70 55 1800 1350 900
DB Disk
(node 1&2)		 75 40 35 2100 1200 900
DB Disk
(node 3, 4 &5)		 30 25 20 800 300 250
Media Disk 85 75 50 8000 5500 2800

Total IOPS requirement

The following table shows three types of data: Typical average IOPS during steady state, occasional average IOPS during some operations such as upgrade and/or backup, and additional IOPS during spikes. As you can see, if operations such as upgrades or backups are done while handling calls, the SAN would need to be able to handle more IOPS. It's also a good practice to provide the information to the SAN engineer on additional during peaks. This would allow the SAN engineer to design the SAN cache or increase the SAN performance to handle those peaks. In general, it is a good practice to provide as much information as possible to the SAN engineer, as shown in this table. Again, once the SAN is deployed and with all application running, monitor the SAN performance and ensure the storage latency requirements are met at all time.

Typical Avg IOPS (steady state) Occasional Avg IOPS
(steady state for a few hours, for example during upgrade or DRS backup)		 Additonal IOPS during Peaks
CUCM PUB/TFTP 300
(93%-98% seq. writes)		 300
(93%-98% seq. writes)
CUCM call processing Subscribers 200
(93%-98% seq. writes)		 200
(93%-98% seq. writes)
IM&P 320 320
CUC 404
(95% seq. writes)		 404
(95% seq. writes)		 Total: 1,144
Read: 1,032   Write: 442
1x DRS 50
1x Upgrade 1,200 (mostly seq. writes)
Total 1,224 (~95% seq. writes) 2,474 (mostly seq. writes) Total: 1,144
Read: 1,032   Write: 442

Cisco HyperFlex TRC

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Below is an example of a Collaboration deployment running on a minimum supported infrastructure solution using HyperFlex M5 TRC. Example VM placement and VLAN/subnet/IP address planning is shown. Note this is not prescriptive guidance, only an example to assist with design and implementation planning. All IP addressing shown below is for illustrative purposes only, actuals will vary by customer deployment.

Design Example

Collaboration Design Assumptions:

HyperFlex Design Assumptions:
  • Cluster of HX nodes spec'd as HX220c M5SX TRC#1 with ESXi 6.5 U2 and HXDP 3.0.
  • 2x 6x00 FI switches.
  • VMware vCenter 6.5 for management.

Figure 1 - Example 5000 users or devices deployment.

 

Deployment Example


Figure 2 - Example VLAN/subnet/IP address planning.

 

  Management Traffic

VLAN 109 (hx-inband-mgmt), 10.89.109.x /8
      HX Storage Data / Cluster Traffic

(non-routable / internal-only for HX Cluster Data)
VLAN 3092 (hx-storage-data), 10.10.0.x /8

      vMotion Traffic for App VMs

VLAN 120 (hx-vmotion), 10.89.120.x /8
      vNIC Traffic for App VMs

VLAN 130 (collab-apps-vnic), 10.89.200.x /8
  Customer Intranet

VLAN/Subnet & Solution Component Need how many IP addresses?
Management access to 6200 FI "A" 1 per solution
Management access to 6200 FI "B" 1 per solution
Management access to UCS Manager 1 per solution
HX Storage Cluster Management 1 per solution
Management access to ESXi 1 per HX TRC node
HX Storage Management / Controller VM 1 per HX TRC node
ESXi access to HX Storage Data Network 1 per HX TRC node
HX Storage Data / Controller VM 1 per HX TRC node
vMotion-ing App VMs 1 per HX TRC node
vNICS for Collaboration App VMs See CVD for "PA for Enterprise Collaboration"
vCenter Customer-defined
HX Data Platform Installer 1 per solution

For HX VLAN and IP address planning, including which subnets must be different, reference Network Settings and VLAN and vSwitch Requirements in the HyperFlex Getting Started Guide.

Features of Cisco HXDP and VMware vSphere ESXi leveraged by Cisco HXDP

Feature HX uses for ... Collab apps ...
vSphere ESX Agent Manager HX Controller VM operation via EAM APIs. Not used by / transparent to Collab apps.
vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) Required for HX non-app-disruptive automated recovery & rolling upgrades. Follow support policy of each app (most Collab apps don't support). If turn off, default to manual procedures.
vSphere MHz Reservations Pre-requisite for DRS. Folllow support policy of each app (e.g. for UCM, IMP, CUC ... see Caveated Support for VMware CPU Reservations and Distributed Resource Scheduler).
vSphere vMotion and High Availability (HA) Pre-requisite for DRS. Follow support policy of each app (most core apps already support vMotion and HA).
vSphere Thin provisioning HX filesystem is inherently thin on the backend, regardless of what VMs are set to. Collab apps don't support Thin on TRCs (see, caveats). To avoid HX resource waste and increased deployment time, VMs should set to Thick Provision (Lazy Zeroed), but NOT Thick (Eager Zeroed).
HX vSphere Snapshot Offload HX uses the native snapshot manager but offloads the snapshot function from vCenter. Follow support policy of each app for ESXi Snapshots.
HX vSphere Clone Offload HX takes instantaneous pointer based clones, VAAI offload from vCenter. Follow support policy of each app for VM cloning.
HX Replication Factor HX storage protection mechanism, transparent to apps. See Hyperflex documentation for impact of setting this to RF=2 or RF=3. Designs should ensure no loss of read-write on node failure.
HX De-dupe & Compression Reduce required storage capacity. Usually disabled for Collab on DAS/SAN/NAS due to introducing IO variance or seeking root access to workload stack. Supported with HX TRC (can't be disabled).
HX Fault Tolerance Redundancy and fault management VMware s ESXi FT feature not supported by Collab apps. HyperFlex leverages several ESXi features like HA (see application support for those features). See HyperFlex documentation for how chassis or disk outages are handled.
HX ACI/vCenter Integrations Systems Management Transparent to Collab apps.

SAN/NAS

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General Guidelines

  • Adapters for storage access must follow supported hardware rules (click here).
  • Cisco UC apps use a 4 kilobyte block size to determine bandwidth needs.
  • Design your deployment in accordance with the UCS High Availability guidelines (see http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns517/ns224/ns944/white_paper_c11-553711.html).
  • 10GbE networks for NFS, FCoE or iSCSI storage access should be configured using Cisco Platinum Class QOS for the storage traffic.
  • Ethernet ports for LAN access and ethernet ports for storage access may be separate or shared. Separate ports may be desired for redundancy purposes. It is the customer's responsibility to ensure external LAN and storage access networks meet UC app latency, performance and capacity requirements.
  • In absence of UCS 6100/6200, normal QoS (L3 and L2 marking) can be used starting from the first upstream switch to the storage array.
  • With UCS 6100/6200
    • FC or FCoE: no additional requirements. Automatically handled by Fabric Interconnect switch.
    • iSCSI or NFS: Follow these best practices:
      • Use a L2 CoS between the chassis and the upstream switch.
      • For the storage traffic, recommend a Platinum class QoS, CoS=5, no drop (Fiber Channel Equivalent)
      • L3 DSCP is optional between the chassis and the first upstream switch.
      • From the first upstream switch to the storage array, use the normal QoS (L3 and L2 marking). Note that iSCSI or NFS traffic is typically assigned a separate VLAN.
      • iSCSI or NFS: Ensure that the traffic is prioritized to provide the right IOPS. For a configuration example, see the FlexPod Secure Multi-Tenant (SMT) documentation (http://www.imaginevirtuallyanything.com/us/).
  • The storage array vendor may have additional best practices as well.
  • If disk oversubscription or storage thin provisioning are used, note that UC apps are designed to use 100% of their allocated vDisk, either for UC features (such as Unity Connection message store or Contact Center reporting databases) or critical operations (such as spikes during upgrades, backups or statistics writes). While thin provisioning does not introduce a performance penalty, not having physical disk space available when the app needs it can have the following harmful effects
    • degrade UC app performance, crash the UC app and/or corrupt the vDisk contents.
    • lock up all UC VMs on the same LUN in a SAN.
  • PCCE 2K deployment does not support NFS-based storage. NFS will be supported in PCCE 4K and 12K deployments.

    Link Provisioning and High Availability

    Consider the following example to determine the number of physical Fiber Channel (FC) or 10Gig Ethernet links required between your storage array (such as the EMC Clariion CX4 series or NetApp FAS 3000 Series) and SAN switch for example, Nexus or MDS Series SAN Switches), and between your SAN switch and the UCS Fabric Interconnect Switch. This example is presented to give a general idea of the design considerations involved. You should contact your storage vendor to determine the exact requirement.

    Assume that the storage array has a total capacity of 28,000 Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS). Enterprise grade SAN Storage Arrays have at least two service processors (SPs) or controllers for redundancy and load balancing. That means 14,000 IOPS per controller or service processor. With the capacity of 28,000 IOPS, and assuming a 4 KByte block size, we can calculate the throughput per storage array controller as follows:

    • 14,000 I/O per second * (4000 Byte block size * 8) bits = 448,000,000 bits per second
    • 448,000,000/1024 = 437,500 Kbits per second
    • 437,500/1024 = ~428 Mbits per second
    Adding more overhead, one controller can support a throughput rate of roughly 600 Mbps. Based on this calculation, it is clear that a 4 Gbps FC interface is enough to handle the entire capacity of one Storage Array. Therefore, Cisco recommends putting four FC interfaces between the storage array and storage switch, as shown in the following image, to provide high availability.

    Note: Cisco provides storage networking and switching products that are based on industry standards and that work with storage array providers such as EMC, NetApp, and so forth. Virtualized Unified Communications is supported on any storage access and storage array products that are supported by Cisco UCS and VMware. For more details on storage networking, see http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns747/networking_solutions_sub_program_home.html.

    Requirements and Best Practices for Storage Array LUNs

    The SAN must be compatible with the VMware HCL and compatible with the supported server model used. A SAN must also meet the following latency storage performance at all time:

    • Host-level kernel disk command latency < 4ms (no spikes above) and
    • Physical device command latency < 20 ms (no spikes above).
    For NFS NAS, guest latency < 24 ms (no spikes above)

    There are various ways to design a SAN in order to meet the IOPS requirement for Cisco Collaboration applications (see IO Operations Per Second (IOPS) and therefore to meet the latency storage performance requirements}.

    The best practices mentioned below are meant only to provide guidelines when deploying a traditional SAN. Data Center storage administrators should carefully consider these best practices and adjust them based on their specific data center network, latency, and high availability requirements.

    Other SAN systems such as tiered storage that vary widely by storage vendor could also be used. In all cases, Data Center storage administrators should monitor the storage performance so that the latency storage performance requirements above are met at all time.

    The storage array Hard Disk Drive (HDD) must be a Fibre Channel (FC) class HDD. These hard drives could vary in size. The current most popular HDD (spindle) sizes are:

    • 450 GB, 15K revolutions per minute (RPM) FC HDD
    • 300 GB, 15K RPM FC HDD
    Both types of HDD provide approximately 180 IOPS. Regardless of the hard drive size used, it is important to try to balance IOPS load and disk space usage.

    For Cisco Unified Communications virtual applications, the recommendation is to create a LUN size of between 500 GB and 1.5 TB, depending on the size of the disk and RAID group type used. Also as a recommendation, select the LUN size so that the number of Unified Communications virtual machines per LUN is between 4 and 8. Do not allocate more than eight virtual machines (VMs) per LUN or datastore. The total size of all Virtual Machines (where total size = VM disk + RAM copy) must not exceed 90% of the capacity of a datastore.

    LUN filesystem type must be VMFS. Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is not supported.

    Example

    The following example illustrates an example of these best practices for UC:

      For example, assume RAID5 (4+1) is selected for a storage array containing five 450 GB, 15K RPM drives (HDDs) in a single RAID group. This creates a total RAID5 array size of approximately 1.4 TB usable space. This is lower than the total aggregate disk drive storage space provided by the five 450 GB drives (2.25 TB). This is to be expected because some of the drive space will be used for array creation and almost an entire drive of data will be used for RAID5 striping.

      Next, assume two LUNs of approximately 720 GB each are created to store Unified Communications application virtual machines. For this example, between one and three LUNs per RAID group could be created based on need. Creating more than three LUNs per RAID group would violate the previously mentioned recommendation of a LUN size of between 500 GB and 1.5 TB.

      A RAID group with RAID 1+0 scheme would also be valid for this example and in fact in some cases could provide better IOPS performance and high availability when compared to a RAID 5 scheme.

    The above example of storage array design should be altered based on your specific Unified Communications application IOPS requirements.

    Below is a graphic of an example configuration following these best practices guidelines, note there are other designs possible.


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