We configured the physical servers to host production and snapshot database VMs as follows:
- We used the following BIOS settings for the PowerEdge servers in this solution:
- Memory settings: Default options
- Processor settings: Default options
- System profile setting: Performance
- To install the bare-metal operating system (ESXi 7.0), we created a single virtual disk in a RAID 1 configuration with two local disks (SSDs or HDDs) per server.
- We installed ESXi 7.0 by using the Dell EMC customized ISO image (Dell Version: A00, Build# 16324942), which is available from Dell Online Support at VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x on Dell EMC PowerEdge Systems Image Customization Information.
- We created one VM on each PowerEdge server.
- We configured, monitored, and maintained the ESXi host, virtual networking, and the VM by using VMware vSphere Web Client and vCenter Server Appliance, which is deployed as a VM on the management server.
- We zoned two dual-port 32 Gbps HBAs (four initiators in total) and configured them with the PowerStore T front-end FC ports for high-bandwidth, load-balanced, and highly available SAN traffic.
- For the Emulex HBAs that we used in the both production and snapshot servers, we set LUN Queue Depth to 128.
Multipath configuration
We configured multipathing on the ESXi 7.0 host according to the following best practices:
- We used VMware Native Multipathing (NMP) as the multipathing software.
- We retained the default selection of round-robin for the native path selection policy (PSP) on the PowerStore T volumes that are presented to the ESXi host.
- We changed the NMP round-robin path-switching frequency from the default value (1,000 I/O packets) to 1.