SCALEIO INSTALLATION LAB

ScaleIO Installation Lab

Table of Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................. 3
ScaleIO Introduction ........................................................................................................................................4

Lab Overview ...................................................................................................................................................7

 Introduction

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ScaleIO Introduction
ScaleIO is a software-only solution that uses existing servers' local disks and LAN to create a virtual SAN that
has all the benefits of external storage, but at a fraction of cost and complexity. ScaleIO utilizes the existing
local internal storage and turns it into internal shared block storage. ScaleIO storage is comparable to, or
better than, any expensive external shared block storage.

The lightweight ScaleIO software components are installed on the application servers and communicate via
a standard LAN to handle the application I/O requests sent to ScaleIO block volumes. An extremely efficient
decentralized block I/O flow, combined with a distributed, sliced volume layout, results in a massively
parallel I/O system that can scale up to thousands of nodes.

ScaleIO is designed and implemented with enterprise-grade resilience. Furthermore, the software features
an efficient, distributed, self-healing process that overcomes media and node failures, without requiring
administrator involvement.

Dynamic and elastic, ScaleIO enables administrators to add or remove nodes and capacity on-the-fly. The
software immediately responds to the changes, rebalancing the storage distribution and achieving a layout
that optimally suits the new configuration.

Because ScaleIO is hardware agnostic, the software works efficiently with various types of disks, including
magnetic (HDD) and solid-state (SSD) disks, flash PCI-Express (PCIe) cards, networks, and hosts.

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ScaleIO architecture’s fundamental positive attributes and advantages:

Convergence - Compute and storage resources are combined into one single layer

Scalability - ScaleIO’s architecture enables large scale-out expansion of hundreds or thousands of servers

Elasticity - Servers and local storage devices can be added to or removed from a ScaleIO storage system on demand in
real-time

Performance - Implementation allows for massive I/O parallelism with each server and local storage device added
(i.e., increased capacity and throughput)

Terminology

The ScaleIO virtual SAN consists of 3 software components:

Meta Data Manager (MDM) - Configures and monitors the ScaleIO system. The MDM can be configured in a redundant
Cluster Mode with three members on three servers, or in a Single Mode on a single server.

ScaleIO Data Server (SDS) - Manages the capacity of a single server and acts as a backend for data access. The SDS is
installed on all servers thay contribute storage devices to the ScaleIO system. These devices are accessed through the
SDS.

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ScaleIO Data Client (SDC) - A lightweight device driver that exposes ScaleIO volumes as block devices to the
application residing on the same server on which the SDC is installed

When configuring a ScaleIO system, there are two elements link the Physical Layer with the Virtualization Layer:
Protection Domain and Storage Pool.

Protection Domain - A Protection Domain is a subset of SDSs. Each SDS belongs to one (and only one) Protection
Domain. Thus, by definition, each Protection Domain is a unique set of SDSs.

Storage Pool - A Storage Pool is a subset of physical storage devices in a Protection Domain. Each storage device
belongs to one (and only one) Storage Pool. A volume is distributed over all devices residing in the same Storage Pool.
This allows more than one failure in the system without losing data. Since a Storage Pool can withstand the loss of one
of its members, having two failures in two different Storage Pools will not cause data loss

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Lab Overview

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Lab Environment

The environment for this lab includes the following:

• 1 Gateway Host
• 1 ESX server with 4 Red Hat Linux (Nested VMs) acting as "Bare-Metal" servers
• ScaleIO Installation version 1.20-0.385

Red Hat Server specifications (VM):

• Number of CPUs: 2
• RAM Memory: 2GB
• Operating System HDD size: 24GB
• ScaleIO HDD size: 40GB
• ScaleIO SSD size: 36GB

User name: root

Password: Password123!

Red Hat Server IPs:

1. RHEL1 - 192.168.1.101
2. RHEL2 - 192.168.1.102
3. RHEL3 - 192.168.1.103
4. RHEL4 - 192.168.1.105

Starting the ScaleIO Lab

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Connecting To a Server

• Double click the PuTTY icon

Start the ScaleIO System

• Use PuTTY to connect to RH2 (192.168.1.102) using root and Password123! as your credentials (See previous
step for instructions)
• Run the following command: "cp /root/ECS/site.cfg.ready_for_install /root/ECS/site.cfg" (To configure your
lab manually, please use the ScaleIO User Guide. Use 192.168.1.102 and 192.168.1.103 as your MDMs and
192.168.1.105 as your Tie Breaker)
• Run the following command: "/root/ECS/install.py --all --license
2PGVLLWL2IEVBL75WQLEGW7XL0LUP09589T2 --no_device_test --profile ssd". Use "scaleio" as the string for
password encryption

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 [root@rhel02 ~]# /root/ECS/install.py --all --license 2PGVLLWL2IEVBL75WQLEGW7XL0LUP09589T2 --
no_device_test --profile ssd
INFO: Starting...
ScaleIO Inc. 2013
This will install ECS software on your system
Please enter string for password encryption:

Note: You will need to complete this lab within 5 days from the time you executed the above command, or the license
will expire.

• Install without the call home ability

WARNING: Call Home will not be configured, it is highly advised to configure Call Home!!!
Are you sure you would like to continue without Call Home configuration?: [y/n] y

• Accept the license agreement

If you accept the license agreement please enter y: [y/n] y

• Allow the installation to complete

• Use the ScaleIO admin guide to create volumes and map them to the SDCs (If you used the pre-configured
ScaleIO installation, the SDCs are 192.168.1.101, 192.168.1.130 and 192.168.1.103. MDM cluster IP is
192.168.1.130). You can also refer to the "ScaleIO Introduction Lab", Chapter 5.
• Open the Dashboard from the Launchpad (Look for the icon as seen above)
• On any of the servers that you mapped a ScaleIO volume to, start IOs using FIO

[root@rhel01 ~]# fio /root/read_write_32k_random_to_local_volume

read_write_32k_random_to_local_ssd: (g=0): rw=randrw, bs=32K-32K/32K-32K, ioengine=libaio,
iodepth=8
fio 1.50
Starting 1 process
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [m] [0.1% done] [3371K/3371K /s] [102 /102 iops] [eta 01h:35m:47]

10. Refer to the "ScaleIO Introduction Lab", "Labs" Chapter or to the ScaleIO User Guide for commands that can be
used for ScaleIO

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