System Overview

The DXi V5000 is a fully-featured Quantum DXi deduplication storage system, running as a virtual machine (VM) inside a hypervisor. Supported hypervisors include KVM, VMware, and Hyper-V. The V5000 can be installed:

This topic provides an overview and requirements for both the System Overview, and Service and Support options for the Licensed Edition.

IMPORTANT! After this topic, continue with:

Planning Your Storage Strategy includes a table of profiles you can use to configure your system and descriptions of the different types of disks to plan and use for different data types.

DXi Installation for installing your DXi system in a Virtual Machine (VM).

V5000 System Description

 

At your first login following installation, your DXi V5000 is a free Community Edition. This edition is free to use with no expiration date and includes a maximum storage limit of 5 TB for deduplicated and compressed user data, also called bulk storage.

After your initial installation the V5000 is a Community Edition, enabled with no additional licenses required for NAS, OST, VDMS (Veeam), Deduplication, Replication, and Data-in-Flight. See Feature Differences from Physical DXi Systems.

You can purchase ingest and storage capacity licenses to upgrade your V5000 from the Community Edition to a Licensed Subscription Edition, to expand storage up to 256 TB. When you upgrade to a Licensed Subscription Edition, your system includes Quantum Service and Support. Quantum Service and Support are not offered for the Community Edition. See Service and Support.

Note: As with all DXi systems, software upgrades are free when available, for both V5000 Community and Licensed Editions.

See Planning Your Storage Strategy and V5000 Configurations and Stream Counts for more information.

The DXi V5000 Licensed Subscription Edition can be expanded by adding more:

  • CPU cores
  • Memory
  • Storage
  • Network ports

The smallest V5000 Community Edition is limited to a few NFS or SMB ingest streams, but you can add memory and CPUs to support more. See V5000 System Profiles for specific system configurations, including storage capacity and stream counts.

You can purchase a license and obtain Quantum Professional Services and Support. This also allows you to expand the DXi (with additional VM resources) to as large as 256 TB.

Note: Once you have installed a license you cannot return the DXi to an unlicensed Community Edition. If your license expires you will always have access to your data, but will not be able to write any new data. The DXi will effectively become read-only.

See DXi Licensing for all licenses you can obtain from Quantum.

Incoming data (ingest) is deduplicated, compressed and stored on disk, using a blockpool. The blockpool tracks the data and its storage location in the filesystem, using an index in memory and on disk. The on-disk data is called blockpool metadata (BP-meta).

As your system's storage capacity for user (bulk) data grows, it will use a larger index and require more memory and metadata to manage that capacity. The V5000 System Profiles table displays capacity points and the required amounts of memory and metadata.

Disk Sizes and Memory - GB or GiB?

GB (Gigabyte) and GiB (Gibibyte), though slightly different, are commonly used interchangeably for storage and throughout the support industry. The user interfaces (UIs) for KVM, VMware, and Hyper-V hypervisors show memory measured in GB, but they are actually GiB. The DXi UI both reads and shows actual disk sizes in GB.

Quantum has tested the V5000 with and supports only the following:

  • KVM for Linux 7.0 and later
  • Hyper-V for Windows
  • VMware ESXi 6.7 and later

Note: Licensed Edition Service and Support is only available for systems using these hypervisors. See Service and Support.

Feature Differences from Physical DXi Systems

The V5000 system uses the same code as physical DXi appliances. The following features are not supported:

  • VTL (Virtual Tape Library)
  • Data-at-rest disk encryption
  • Path-to-tape (PTT)
  • DXi Application Environment (DAE, creating a VM inside a DXi)
  • Increased Stream Count (ISC)
  • Cloud Share

Note: Cloud-based Analytics, or CBA, is only available for Licensed systems.

Community Edition System Requirements

You can start with this configuration and expand it later. Your disks may have more space available than those noted here. If you plan to license and expand your V5000 storage capacity, it may be beneficial to begin with a larger setup. See Planning Your Storage Strategy.

The minimum V5000 VM Community Edition configuration requires:

  • 2 x 64-bit x86 CPU cores
  • 4 GiB of memory
  • 1 network port (1 TB or faster)
  • 1 virtual CD-ROM drive (for installation only)

    • Note: The CD-ROM is only used during ISO installation and can be removed when installation is complete.

  • 1 x 100 GB boot disk, IDE, SCSI or virtio

    Note: (Virtio is a term used in the KVM hypervisor and is a standardized open interface for VMs to access simplified devices like block devices and network adapters.)

  • 1 x 100 GB SCSI bulk data disk (thin-provisioned)
  • 1 x 52 GB SCSI blockpool metadata disk (BP-meta)
  • 1 x 5 GB SCSI StorNext metadata disk (SN-meta)

NOTES ON PLANNING YOUR INITIAL CONFIGURATION

  • Your system's performance will vary, depending on your system hardware, hypervisor, server platform, network, etc. Quantum recommends operating only one V5000 per hypervisor. See Planning Your Storage Strategy.

  • At initial configuration or as your system data grows, adding memory or CPUs may not yield an increase in performance. During initial setup you can double-click the Information icon on your VM desktop, then click analyze, and depending on your configuration, the System Configuration Analysis screen may provide helpful analysis and tips on possible reconfiguration. For example, Your profile capacity is larger than the bulk capacity. Perhaps consider adding x TB more storage.

The minimum configuration defined above will work well for many users, but with limited performance in an enterprise-sized environment. For a well-provisioned Community Edition with maximum I/O available, provision the following:

  • 4 x 64-bit x86 CPU cores
  • 8 GiB of memory
  • 1 network port
  • 1 CD-ROM drive
  • 1 x 100 GB boot disk, IDE, SCSI or virtio
  • 1 x 5000 GB SCSI bulk data disk
  • 1 x 51 GB SCSI blockpool metadata disk (BP-meta)
  • 1 x 5 GB SCSI StorNext metadata disk (SN-meta)

V5000 software upgrades for both the free Community Edition and the Licensed Subscription Edition are available at no cost, just as they are for physical DXi systems.

  • When your V5000 is connected to the Internet, it will poll once daily for available software upgrades and notify you if one is available with a download link from the home page.

  • If your VM is not connected, you can manually upload an upgrade file. See Software Upgrades.

For technical service and support, you must purchase a Capacity Upgrade license from Quantum. See Licensing Your DXi V5000.

V5000 System Profiles

The 4 profile types shown in the System Profiles table (Tiny, Small, Medium, or Large) have similar capacity capabilities, but can support a higher number of streams for ingest, replication, or restoring your data.

Note: The Tiny model is the smallest possible VM. The OVA will match this size.

The following table shows V5000 predefined settings for the four different models and displays the required disk sizing per configuration.

Model Maximum Bulk Disk (TB/GiB) Minimum BP-meta Disk (GB/GiB) Minimum SN-meta Disk (GB/GiB) Minimum VM Memory (GiB/MiB) Recommended Minimum CPU Cores Fan-in
Tiny (Community Edition) 5/4657 52/48 5/5 4/4096 2 1
Small 5/4657 52/49 5/5 14/14336 4 1
Small 16/14902 150/140 16/15 16/16384 4 1
Medium 16/14902 150/140 16/15 20/20480 6 5
Medium 32/29803 298/278 32/30 24/24576 6 5
Medium 64/59605 594/554 64/60 32/32768 6 5
Medium 128/119210 1185/1104 128/120 47/48128 6 5
Medium 256/238419 2360/2198 256/239 77/78848 6 5
Large 32/29803 298/278 32/30 29/29696 8 10
Large 64/59605 594/554 64/60 37/37888 8 10
Large 128/119210 1185/1104 128/120 52/53248 8 10
Large 256/238419 2360/2198 256/239 82/83968 8 10

Note: Each model in the above table maps to the Stream Counts by Model table's information for the supported protocol. For example, if you run the Small model, regardless of the total capacity, you should be able to use 5 NFS streams. The actual number of streams that your V5000 system will be capable of handling efficiently depends on your physical hardware.

GB and GiB, though slightly different, are commonly used interchangeably for storage and throughout the IT industry. The definitions can be looked up and are well defined. The following table is just for your reference.

Hypervisor UI to Actual Disk Size
KVM UI says GB, but actual disk sizes are in GiB.
VMware
Hyper-V
V5000 UI UI says GB, actual sizes are in GB.

Quantum tested the following stream counts on hardware compatible with VMware ESXi 7.0.2 and KVM.

Size SMB NFS Veeam Write/Read1 OST Accent Accelerator Legacy OST Multi-Protocol (MP)
Tiny 2 2 2 / 1 2 0 2 2
Small 10 10 6 / 3 15 2 10 10
Medium 20 20 15 / 5 30 5 20 15
Large 50 50 25 / 10 75 11 50 50

1 In order to use the VDMS feature, you must have at least 16 GB memory available to VDMS, in addition to the minimum VM memory. The number of VDMS streams may vary - estimate to use 400-600 MB per Backup stream and 1-1.5 GB memory per Restore stream. Veeam NAS backup streams can consume up to a maximum of 8 GB memory per job. These memory consumption ranges are based on testing using Veeam 11. In order to increase the VDMS stream counts, you can add RAM to your VM, based on the memory consumption budgets listed above. At some time you may need to increase the profile to support larger stream counts.

VMware was tested using all defaults and was configured with:

  • 3 CPUs, 8 cores (24 cores total), CPU shares "high"

    • Note: Allocating all available physical cores resulted in added hypervisor overhead and lower VM performance.

  • 132 GiB memory
  • Bulk storage thick provisioned
  • SD storage thin provisioned

Note: See Storage Overview and Disk Provisioning.

KVM was tested using all defaults and was configured with:

  • 2 CPU sockets, 8 cores, 2 threads (32 cores total), passthrough mode
  • 132 GiB memory
  • All storage thin provisioned atop an XFS filesystem
Test V5000 Metadata on SSD (TB/Day) V5000 with No SSD (TB/Day)
A - VMware 73 37
A - KVM 121 37
B - VMware 82 40
B - KVM 126 40

KEY

A: With no concurrent operations.

B: With concurrent store and GC.

TEST NOTES

  • Tests were performed with 32 ingest I/O streams in the Large configuration profile.
  • As the table shows, putting metadata on SSDs can double your overall performance.

    • Note: Bulk storage was always on HDDs.

  • KVM was more efficient in CPU emulation and showed increased performance over VMware.
  • Without SSDs performance is more limited to storage and the CPU is less of a bottleneck.
  • Your V5000 performance will differ and depends on many factors, like your physical hardware, the nature of the ingest data, your network, etc.