After finishing the previous Stage XXV: New Nvidia GPUs for my HomeLab it was time to update my primary vSAN All Flash again…..
As I described in Stage XXI: vSAN 6.6 All Flash with 40GbE the “bottleneck” within my All Flash configuration seems to be the Fusion IO cards. I upgraded vSAN to 6.6.1 and decided to replace them with the latest enterprise stuff that is available:
Intel DC P3700 NVMe PCIe 800GB….
Here are the specifications:
Nice numbers….. The 1,6 TB model can achieve 150.000 IOPs write… Mine “only” 90.000.
The device is fully supported for vSAN All Flash caching….. I am using a Lenovo branded card.
My Fusion IO ioDrive2 Dual 365GB configuration results in 2 disk groups, each containing 2 x 2TB SanDisk Enterprise SSDs.
I placed one host of my 2 Node cluster into maintenance mode and deleted both disk groups. After that, I shut down the server and replaced both Fusion IO cards with one new P3700 NVMe device.
Now I created one new disk group containing 4 x 2TB SanDisk 2TB SSDs…..
The resync of the data from the other cluster node took several hours….
I repeated the same procedure at the other node….
Everything is up and running again and fully supported…..
I have customer installations where they reached a Dedupe and Compression factor of 4-5. (They all use 7 capacity SSDs, not 4 like I did at home)
The performance of my primary vSAN All Flash is absolutely amazing. I have also 2 other vSAN cluster running at my two datacenter locations within my house. You can check the status here: HomeLab Actual State
My vSAN is now up to date, the datacenter Infrastructure upgraded and the datacenter network operating at 10/40 GbE.
What´s next?
The non-datacenter network needs an upgrade……
Check my next HomeLab episode: Stage XXVII: Ubiquiti Network Upgrade