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For redundancy reasons, use at least two fibre channel (FC) host bus adapters (HBAs) connected to the storage array over two switches. If you deploy multiple virtualized SAP HANA production nodes on a single ESXi host, the storage bandwidth and latency must fulfill the SAP TDI KPIs for each SAP HANA system. See SAP and VMWare documentation for information on how many SAP HANA production systems can be deployed per physical host
In TDI deployments, a single SAP HANA production node requires 400 MB/s maximum bandwidth. With four SAP HANA production nodes on a single physical ESXi host, the combined bandwidth of all HBAs on the host must be at least 4 x 400 MB/s (1600 MB/s), for example, a single 8 Gb/s FC HBA provides approximately 750 MB/s bandwidth.
Dell EMC recommends increasing the HBA queue depth on the ESXi host to 128:
# esxcli system module parameters set -p lpfc_lun_queue_depth=128 -m lpfc
# esxcli system module parameters list -m lpfc|grep lpfc_lun_queue_depth
If the ESXi host is using vSphere Native Multipathing (NMP), Dell EMC recommends using round-robin for the multipath setting for PowerStore, PowerMax, VMAX All Flash, Unity XT, SC Series, and XtremIO X2 storage arrays. For best performance, set the multipath round-robin policy for the I/O operation limit to 1. For the SC Series, set the I/O operation limit to 3. The current VMware default value for this setting is 1000.
To change the default policy setting from fixed to round-robin and the host I/O operation limit to 1:
# esxcli storage nmp device list
# esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -I 1 -t iops -d <naa.deviceid>
# esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig get -d <naa.deviceid>
Dell EMC PowerPath/VE for VMware vSphere can be used as an alternative to, or in combination with, vSphere NMP. PowerPath/VE is a multipathing extensions module for vSphere, providing software that works with SAN storage to intelligently manage FC, iSCSI, and FC over Ethernet (FCoE) I/O paths. PowerPath/VE is installed on the vSphere host and scales to the maximum number of virtual machines on the host, thus improving I/O performance. The virtual machines do not have PowerPath/VE installed and are not aware that PowerPath/VE is managing I/O to storage. PowerPath/VE dynamically load-balances I/O requests and automatically detects and recovers from path failures.
PowerPath/VE automatically assigns an optimized load-balancing policy for all PowerPath-managed devices. Dell EMC recommends that you use the default optimized load-balancing and failover policies that PowerPath/VE assigns to the devices based on the underlying storage array type.