Unified Storage Simulator: Too Fun to be Legal

As I mentioned, we released a simulator as part of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System (*) launch event yesterday. I geeked out and took it for a quick spin today to get a first-hand view of its capabilities. Short summary: this is a really cool way to play with one of these new storage appliances from the comfort of your existing desktop or laptop with no extra hardware required. It’s all virtual, baby. Check this out…

The simulator (download it from here) is basically a VMware virtual machine that has been pre-loaded with the Unified Storage System software stack and configured with 15 virtual 2 GB disks. Here is what I did to try it out.

First I downloaded the simulator and booted the virtual machine using VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro. The boot is straightforward with one tiny exception. At one point I was asked for a password, which stumped me since there is no mention in the instructions on the download page about supplying a password. As it turns out, this is where you specify the root password for the appliance. Pick something you will remember since you will need it to access the appliance’s administrative interface later.

Once the appliance has booted it will display some helpful information about next steps, the most important of which is to access the appliance via its web interface to configure it for use. With the appliance running in a virtual machine on my Mac, I used the Safari web browser under Mac OS X to contact the appliance at the hostname (or IP address) supplied by the DHCP server when the appliance booted and using the port number shown in the documentation (port 215.)

I then logged into the appliance using the root password I had specified earlier. The BUI then walked me through a set of configuration steps that included networking, DNS, NTP, and name services. The process was simple and quick since the defaults were correct for most questions. Once I finished the basic configuration, I reached the following screen:

This is where it starts to get fun. This interface helps you choose which replication profile makes most sense for the storage that will be managed by your appliance. Each option is ranked by availability, performance, and capacity. The pie chart on the left illustrates how storage will be allocated under each scheme. In the case of Double Parity RAID, you can see that data and parity are placed on 14 disks and the last disk is held as a spare. In contrast, when I selected the “Striped” option, I saw this:

You can see that this strategy delivers maximum capacity and also great performance since I can get all those spindles working at once on my IO requests, but at the expense of low availability, which might be perfectly fine for a scratch file system. I opted for a Double Parity RAID scheme for my filesystem.

Once I configured the storage I visited the Shares tab and created an NFS filesystem called “ambertest.” Again, this was straightforward. Straightforward enough that I forgot to take a screenshot of that step. Sorry about that.

I then mounted my new NFS filesystem under Mac OS X:

% mount -t nfs ip-address-or-hostname-of-the-virtual-storage-appliance:/export/ambertest /Volumes/amber

As a test, I copied several directory trees from my local Mac file system into the NFS filesystem exported by the virtual appliance and also ran several small test scripts to manipulate NFS files in various ways to generate load so I could play with the Analytics component of the appliance.

This is the part that should be illegal. Because the appliance stack is built on top of Solaris, DTrace is available for doing deep dives on all sorts of usage and performance information that would be interesting to an administrator of such a storage appliance. Here is one silly example that will give you a little flavor of what you can do with this capability. It is a much wider and deeper facility than this simple example shows.

Consider the following page:

I used the Analytics interface to graphically select a metric of interest–in this case, number of NFS v3 operations per second broken out by filename. The main graphical display shows how that metric varies over time and allows me to move backwards or forward in time, look at historical data, zoom in and out, pause data collection, etc. The lower pane in this case shows me the directories that are currently being touched within the NFS filesystem by ongoing operations. Individual files are listed in the small pane to the left of the timeline.

When I selected the pltestsuite line in the bottom pane, the timeline updated to show me exactly when in time the operations related to the files in that directory actually occurred. Since my test was a simple ‘cp -r’ of a directory tree into the NFS-mounted directory on the Mac, the display shows me when the files within the pltestsuite directory were cancelled and the NFS load generated by that part of the overall copy operation. I can easily see which file activity is contributing to load on the appliance–very useful for an administrator, for example.

In addition to examining NFS operations by filename, I can break down NFS statistics by type of operation, by client, by share, by project, by latency, by size, or by offset. I can do the same for CIFS or HTTP/WebDAV requests. NFS v4? No problem. Network traffic, disk operations, cache accesses, CPU utilization? It’s all there in one easy-to-use, integrated web-based interface. To me, the Analytics are one of the coolest parts of the product since observability is often the first step to good performance and effective capacity planning.

If you are curious about the capabilities of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Server line, I do recommend trying the simulator. In addition to offering an effective way to explore the product without buying one (we expect you’ll want to buy one after you finish 🙂 ), it is interesting to see how desktop virtualization neatly enabled us to create this simulator experience.

(*) Named, no doubt, by Sun’s department of redundancy department. I liked the code name better.