Previous Changes

• Added statement about vCenter alerts of “high memory usage” for the SANsymphony virtual machine.
• Added link to VMware’s “Performance Best Practices” document.

Added the following:

This document has been reviewed for SANsymphony 10.0 PSP9. No additional settings or configurations are required.

Added the following:

The SANsymphony virtual machine settings - Memory

When running a DataCore Server inside a virtual machine, do not enable Hyper-V's 'Dynamic Memory' setting for the SANsymphony virtual machine as this may cause less memory than expected to be assigned to SANsymphony’s cache driver.

Added the following:

Disk storage - ESXi Raw Device Mapping (RDM)

When using RDM as storage for use in SANsymphony Disk Pools, disable ESXi’s ‘SCSI INQUIRY Caching’. This allows SANsymphony to detect and report any unexpected changes in storage device paths managed by ESXi’s RDM feature.

Also See

Virtual Machines with RDMs Must Ignore SCSI INQUIRY Cache

New section added:

Microsoft Hyper-V Deployment Examples

Users have reported to DataCore that before applying ESXi 6.7, Patch. The information on Hyper-converged Hyper-V deployment has been rewritten along with new detailed diagrams and explanatory technical notes.

Added the following:

DataCore Servers in virtual machines running SANsymphony 10.0 PSP7 Update 2 or earlier should run the appropriate PowerShell scripts found attached to the Customer Services FAQ: SANsymphony - iSCSI Best Practices

Added the following:

Affects ESX 6.7 only

Failover/Failback takes significantly longer than expected.

Users have reported to DataCore that before applying ESXi 6.7, Patch Release ESXi-6.7.0-20180804001 (or later) failover could take in excess of 5 minutes. DataCore are recommending (as always) to apply the most up-to-date patches to your ESXi operating system.

Also See

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/56535.

Added the following:

The information in this section was originally titled ‘Configure ESXi host and Guest VM for DataCore Server for low latency’. The following settings have been added:

• Turbo Boost should be disabled on the ESXi Host
• Latency Sensitivity should be set to ‘High’

Refer to the specific entries in this document for more details.

• ESX Hosts with IP addresses that share the same IQN connecting to the same DataCore Server Front-end port is not supported (this also includes ESXi 'Port Binding'). Applies to SANsymphony 10.0 PSP6 Update 5 and earlier.
• HPE ProLiant Gen10 Servers Running VMware ESXi 6.5 (or Later) may lose connectivity to Storage Devices.
• vHBAs and other PCI devices may stop responding when using Interrupt Remapping
• VMware tools 10.0.2.0 issues and 10.0.3.0 recall with workaround.

Updated the following:

This section has been renamed to ‘VMware ESXi deployment’. The following settings have been updated:

• CPU
• Virtual SCSI Controller
• Disable interrupt coalescing

Refer to the specific entries in this document for more details and make sure that your existing settings are changed/ updated accordingly.

Removed the following:

Examples using the DataCore Loopback Port in a Hyper-V Cluster configuration have been removed as SANsymphony is currently unable to assign PRES registrations to all other non-active Loopback connects for a virtual disk. This could lead to certain failure scenarios where MSCS Reservation Conflicts prevent access for some/ all of the virtual disks on the remaining Hyper-V Cluster. Use ISCSI loopback connections instead.

Removed the following:

The information in this section was originally titled ‘Configure ESXi host and Guest VM for DataCore Server for low latency’. The following settings have been removed:

• NUMA/vCPU affinity

DataCore are no longer making recommendations regarding NUMA/ vCPU affinity settings as we have found that different server vendors have different NUMA settings that can be changed, and that many users have reported that making these changes made no difference and, in extreme cases, caused slightly worse performance than before. Users who may have already changed these settings based using the previous document and are running without issue do not need to revert anything.

Added the following:

Updated the VSAN License feature to include 1 registered host Removed example with MS Cluster using Loopback ports (currently not supported)

Updated the following:

Corrected errors, added references to VMware documentation and added Disable Delayed ACK.

Removed the following:

ESXi 5.5 because of issues only fixed in ESXi 6.0 Update 2 https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2129176