Connecting ESXi Hosts to PowerStore:

When connecting ESXi hosts to PowerStore, it is crucial to follow best practices to ensure optimal performance and reliability.

Round Robin Multipathing:

Dell recommends configuring Round Robin Multipathing with an IOPS limit of 1024. This setting helps balance the load across multiple paths, preventing any single path from becoming a bottleneck and improving overall performance.

Other Options:

DelayedACK: Generally not recommended for iSCSI configurations due to potential performance issues.

Two NAS Servers for vVol Datastores: Not a standard recommendation for general PowerStore-ESXi connectivity.

Default 8k host I/O size for NFS: Not a specific recommendation for this context.

Dell Midrange Storage Reference:

Dell PowerStore documentation and VMware integration guides provide detailed best practices for connecting ESXi hosts, including multipathing configurations.

Dell PowerStore Best Practices Guide

Dell Community on PowerStore and VMware

When sizing Dell Unity XT storage solutions, avoiding bottlenecks and improving performance can be achieved by considering the following parameters:

Port Utilization: Ensuring that the storage system's ports are utilized efficiently helps in distributing the workload evenly across available resources, preventing any single port from becoming a bottleneck.

Workload Types: Understanding and categorizing different workload types (e.g., random vs. sequential, read vs. write) allows for better allocation of resources and tuning of the storage system to handle specific performance requirements.

Dell Technologies Unity XT Sizing Guide

Dell Entry-Level and Mid-Range Storage Community

In Dell Unity XT storage processors, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) ports are used to move data to and from the backend drives. SAS ports provide a high-speed and reliable connection between the storage processors and the physical drives, ensuring efficient data transfer and access. This connectivity is crucial for maintaining the performance and scalability of the storage system. Reference: Dell Unity XT Architecture

When connecting Disk Array Enclosures (DAEs) to SAS ports on a Dell Unity XT DPE (Disk Processor Enclosure) with only two ports available on each SP (Storage Processor), the recommended order is DAE 1 to SAS Bus 0, DAE 2 to SAS Bus 1, and DAE 3 to SAS Bus 0. This configuration helps in balancing the load across the available SAS ports, ensuring optimal data flow and performance. Reference: Dell Unity XT Configuration Guide

The issue arises because File Operations were entered into the PowerSizer tool, but MiB/s (Megabytes per second) was not entered. This causes the tool to translate File Operations into IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) for the cluster and appliance summary details, but since MiB/s was not entered, it does not impact the summary throughput (MiB/s). Here's the detailed explanation:

File Operations Entry: When file operations are entered, the tool calculates the corresponding IOPS to summarize the workload's impact on the system.

MiB/s Entry Missing: If the MiB/s value is not provided, the tool cannot incorporate this metric into the overall summary, leading to a mismatch where IOPS are calculated but do not affect the MiB/s summary.

Dell Technologies PowerSizer Tool Documentation

Dell Entry-Level and Mid-Range Storage Community