Hello!
First time posting here and being beginner on 3PAR as well. We're moving from a EVA 4400 to a 7200c with 24x 480 GB SSD with a single CPG containing a number of tdvv's published to either a 3-host vsphere environment (running VMFS5) or single server blades running NTFS directly on the vv.
We have very poor dedup ratio, on average 1.2. I have understand that part of the reason for this is that all our NTFS volumes (regardless within VM's on VMFS or directly on vv) are default 4KB cluster size, many were not defrag:ed or zeroed out before migrated, but also the fact that some servers, like SQL-servers just cannot be deduped much at all.
I was suggested by HP support to create a second CPG with only tpvv's and try to put non-dedup-friendly systems like Exchange and SQL there, leaving the original CPG with tdvv.
We're soon about to install MS Exchange on both a VM and a physical server, this time doing it right on 64KB cluster size. Is it worth using non-standard settings on this second CPG, like 512KiB step size as recommended per 3PAR Exchange whitepaper?
Does this sound like a good idea to you? Should I even consider moving virtualised SQL-servers data volumes over there too, away from the deduped CPG?
Anything else worth knowing?
Kind regards
Magnus