NIMBLE VOLUME COLLECTION SOFTWAREThe terminology and features of Virtual Volumes are detailed in (Understanding Virtual Volumes (VVols) in VMware vSphere 6.7).Nimble VVol ComponentsNimble software includes the vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) provider and the PE (Protocol Endpoint) built into the operating system. The post was originally published in September 2016 and has subsequently been brought up to date, the process remains largely the same and in this example we will use the vSphere 6.7 HTML5 client and Nimble software version 5.0.4. This post will walk through the setup of VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) with HPE Nimble Storage. What is different about Nimble is the architecture is not based on drive spindles to deliver performance as like traditional storage arrays, rather using multiple Intel Xeon processors to drive IOPS from the array. You then can increase capacity by attaching up to a further 3 shelves of high-capacity drives using the SAS connectors on the controllers, or you can scale performance by upgrading the controllers or swapping for larger SSDs. Finally on the left we have a breakdown of events over the last 24 hours.Array ManagementPrior to Nimble OS 2.0, the architecture worked with a frame / scale up based design where you start with a head unit that contains 2 controllers, 12 high-capacity spinning disks and a number of high-performance SSDs. In the middle we have a breakdown of throughput in MB/Sec and IOPS broken down by Reads and Writes. On the left we can see a breakdown of the storage usage including snapshots, below this we can see what our space saving is, utilising the in-line compression technology for both primary and snapshot data. I sat down with a good friend of mine Nick Dyer around 6 months ago, Nick at the time had been with Nimble for only a few months after previously being at Xsigo and Dell EqualLogic, we discussed who Nimble were and what made them different to everyone else in the market place, Nick also gave me a tour of its features and functionality.Very recently Nimble have announced Nimble OS 2.0, which this walkthrough is based on and big thanks to Nick for helping me up date this from 1.X to 2.XHome ScreenThe home screen shows you a good overview of what is happening within your storage array. If you are using an alternative storage provider cross check your hardware with VVols in the VMware Compatibility Guide.This is a blog post that has been long overdue, I have blogged about Nimble Storage a couple of times when at VMworld and Devin Hamilton (Director of Storage Architecture & Nimble’s first ever customer-facing engineer) was also on one of the HandsonVirtualization podcasts that we recorded in the past. At the time of writing all Nimble storage support VVols.Check with your storage provider that they support VASA 2.0 (vSphere 6.0) or VASA 3.0 (vSphere 6.5). Nimble have included the vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) in the software.There are no additional licensing requirements or costs to use VVols with Nimble.Nimble arrays must be running OS v3.x or above.If you have already licensed vSphere for standard or above there is no additional cost.Before you can implement VVols you need to be running vSphere 6 or above.Nimble folders were added in v3 of the OS and represent a logical allocation of capacity, vSphere sees the folders as containers where virtual volumes can reside. Virtual machines are provisioned based on the VMware Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) framework which uses the VASA client, both features are key to VVols and were introduced with vSphere 6.
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