Virtualization introduces an element of simplicity and agility lacking in the physical world, providing administrators with a single view of resources under hypervisor control (CPU, memory, and networking). Virtualization owes its success in transforming data centers to the power of abstraction; unhinging operating systems and their components from the confines and limitations of what is…
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Being able to set quality of service at the VM level allows an organization to guarantee each application its own level of performance and protect others by limiting their performance as well. These capabilities change the way you approach the tiering of storage. No longer do you need to plan out your storage-based tiers on…
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Snapshots Legacy shared-storage architectures provide snapshots of storage objects, such as LUNs and volumes, rather than VMs. These snapshot technologies lead to inefficient storage utilization, as hundreds of VMs with varying change rates are often snapshotted at once. Snapshot schedules can only be set at a LUN or volume level, leading to such best practice…
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Troubleshooting storage performance problems in a virtual environment can be dreadful. Complaints about a slow VM can often be attributed to storage, but how do you verify this when the VM is sharing a LUN with a dozen other VMs, and that LUN is a slice of a RAID array that contains many other LUNs?…
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Simply put, this is the inherent ability of a storage system to understand which data corresponds to which VM. Leading virtualization software platforms VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V support NAS protocols: NFSv3 and SMB, respectively. When operating with NAS-based storage, a VM’s virtual disks correspond to individual files on the NAS server. Most VMs are…
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