Dell EMC ScaleIO Software Defined Storage with ESXi 5.5, ESXi 6.0 and ESXi 6.5

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information about support for the deployment of EMC ScaleIO versions 1.32 and 2.0 in ESXi 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5 environments. ScaleIO is fully supported in systems deploying the VMware configurations described below. 

Disclaimer: The partner products referenced in this article are hardware devices or software that are developed and supported by stated partners. Use of these products is also governed by the end user license agreements of the partners. You must obtain the application, support and licensing for using these products from the partners. 

Environment

• VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
• VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5

Resolution

ScaleIO

Dell EMC ScaleIO is a software-only server-based storage area network (SAN) that converges storage and compute resources to form a hyper-converged, enterprise-grade storage product. ScaleIO storage is elastic and delivers linearly scalable performance. Its scale-out server SAN architecture can grow from a few to thousands of servers.

For a detailed support matrix of ScaleIO versions supported with VMware ESXi please refer to the following documents:

• Dell EMC Simple Support matrix for ScaleIO software
• Dell EMC Simple Support matrix for ScaleIO Ready Node

Minimum requirements

These are the minimum system requirements for a ScaleIO implementation:

• Three ESXi servers with 100 GB of free capacity per server
• 1 Gbps network

  ESXi 5.5, 6.0	ScaleIO versions 1.32, 2.0, 2.0, 2.0.0.1, 2.0.0.2, 2.0.0.3, 2.0.1, 2.0.1.1, 2.0.1.2
  ESXi 6.5	ScaleIO version 2.0.1.3, 2.0.1.4, 2.5

  
  
  

The ScaleIO hyper-converged configuration consists of a dedicated ScaleIO Virtual Machine (SVM) and three software components:

• ScaleIO Virtual Machine (SVM): The SVM is a Linux-based virtual machine dedicated to ScaleIO and is used to host the different ScaleIO software components described here.
• Meta Data Manager (MDM): Configures and monitors the ScaleIO system. The MDM is configured in redundant Cluster Mode. The MDM is installed on the SVM. In ScaleIO 1.32 the MDM is configured as a three-node cluster (Primary MDM, Secondary MDM and Tie-Breaker MDM). In ScaleIO 2.0 there is an additional option of configuring the MDM as a five-node cluster (Primary MDM, 2 Secondary MDMs and 2 Tie-Breaker MDMs) to provide greater resiliency.
• ScaleIO Data Server (SDS): Manages the capacity of a single server and acts as a back-end for data access. The SDS is installed on all servers contributing storage devices to the ScaleIO system. These devices are accessed using SDS. The SDS is installed on the SVM.
• ScaleIO Data Client (SDC): A lightweight device driver exposes ScaleIO volumes as block devices to the application located on the same server on which the SDC is installed. The SDC creates a logical adapter, which is an ESXi kernel construct. The logical adapter informs the ESXi about the arrival and disappearance of SCSI devices. These LUNs can be formatted with VMFS and then exposed using the ESXi host to the virtual machine or can be used as RDM devices. This is depicted in Figure1. Note that the SDC is installed inside the ESXi kernel and can be installed like any other VIB.

Figure 1: ScaleIO implementation in ESXi with SDC in VMkernel.

Supported Features

 

These VMware features are supported by ScaleIO:

• vMotion and Storage vMotion
• Fault Tolerance
• DRS and Storage DRS
• VAAI (except Full Copy primitive)

Recommendations and limitations

ScaleIO offers a vSphere plug-in for easy installation and deployment in VMware ESXi environments. It is recommended to use ScaleIO vSphere plug-in for the deployment and provisioning process. The ScaleIO plug-in for vSphere enables you to perform all the ScaleIO activities in a simple and efficient manner for all the ESXi nodes in vCenter Server. The plug-in can be used for provisioning ScaleIO nodes and on an existing ScaleIO cluster adding additional SDS nodes.