With VMWorld approaching, vendors have already made announcements regarding storage and VMware with many to follow after the show begins next week.
These announcements come mostly from storage vendors focused on the way storage is used in VMware environments. The volume of announcements highlight how critically important storage is in the world of server virtualization. The cost of storage can eclipse the capital savings from server virtualization if important issues are not correctly addressed during the virtualization projects.
Many storage issues can arise if there is a lack of adequate planning for server virtualization. A Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can dramatically exacerbate issues with storage. Evaluator Group articles have looked at some of the potential problems with storage and virtualization, including:
• Wide striping across many physical disks spreads out I/Os for virtual machines to compensate for the reduced number of drives caused by the consolidation of physical servers into virtual machines.
• Use of solid state devices for tiered storage or for tiered caching of data to provide electronic speeds for accessing highly active data.
• Exploitation of storage system features such as writeable clones (snapshots) and remote replication.
• Advanced storage system features working with VMware enablements such as VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) .
• Thin provisioning of volumes to minimize trapped capacity. Space reclamation is required to maintain “thinness.”
New enhancements to VMware include better integration of VMware and storage systems/software in the areas of Disaster Recovery/Business Continuance (BC/DR) and backups. These integrations represent opportunities to improve operations and efficiency, but will change workflows in most cases for the virtualized environment.
While these are great advances, IT operations will still have non-virtualized (physical) servers. That means there will be operational differences in these areas. IT shops on average have virtualized less than half of their environments, indicating that a bifurcated workflow strategy will persist for some time.
An ongoing area of improvement between VMware and storage is in the area of administration. There is a fundamental change underway regarding who manages the storage. Tools provided for virtualization allow non-storage administrators to do more of the storage provisioning required when they create virtual machines.
Additional management integration will be announced at VMWorld and improvements will continue. The administration, like the integration of BC/DR and backup capabilities, will likely be different between virtualized servers and non-virtualized servers and will continue to be that way for some time.
Server virtualization has been a major shift in IT operations and has brought a critical focus on storage. The focus and the parade of improvements will continue for some time, as will the changes in how it all gets managed.
