Items Tagged: vSphere

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Doubling VM Density with HP 3PAR Storage

This paper examines HP 3PAR Utility Storage and describes how the solution overcomes typical virtual infrastructure storage issues, enabling customers to increase VM density by at least two-fold as a result.

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Better Together: Optimizing VMware vSphere Deployments with Dell's EqualLogic Integration Tools

In our view, VMware-based virtual server environments and the storage platforms that support them have evolved from the rapid growth phase of the last decade into a critical optimization phase. The drive so far had been cost containment. But now vSphere platform and the surrounding ecosystem have matured to the point where virtualization actually improves resiliency and agility. Therefore the organizations are starting to virtualize critical applications, desktops and even build flexible cloud environments.

This translates to an increasing demand for virtual server and storage solutions that are more tightly integrated with one another, deliver higher performance with greater resiliency, and are easier to provision, optimize, and protect. Storage today must compliment virtualization—not complicate it. VMware customers should take advantage of this transition phase to take stock of their virtualized assets—both server and storage—and identify any storage-related performance issues, single points of failure, and redundant tools and processes. With this knowledge in hand, we recommend investigating VMware’s latest platform release, vSphere 5.0, and the storage and data protection features that have been added or enhanced.

In this Brief, we call out some storage-related highlights of vSphere 5.0, and then take a close look at how they have been enhanced and packaged by Dell into the EqualLogic PS Series storage solution. We’ll show how Dell and VMware have combined forces to deliver an enterprise-class virtual server and storage environment that is highly optimized and directly addresses the performance, availabil-ity, data protection and complexity challenges common in today’s business-critical virtualized data centers.

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Dell has made this paper available for free download: http://dell.to/QxughV

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EMC PowerPath/VE: Enhancing resiliency, performance, and management

Unfortunately, too many data centers rely solely on native multipathing tools, and tolerate consequent and oftentimes unrecognized compromises in efficiency, management, and resiliency. Seemingly though, only one storage juggernaut has ever delivered a truly differentiated and distinguished approach to multipathing – EMC. EMC’s PowerPath offers multipathing for VMware, Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX. Based on a secret sauce of patented, path-optimizing algorithms, the PowerPath/VE version of the PowerPath software family optimizes and enhances management for I/O beneath VMware vSphere and the virtual data center.

However, even with VMware there is no such thing as virtualizing the complexity out of the virtualized data center, especially when it comes to storage. I/O characteristics become much more challenging to manage from multiple VMs running on a single host. Woven together into a data center of many hosts, I/O becomes even more complex. I/O suddenly becomes dependent upon both a physical fabric, plus a virtual fabric – either of which may introduce errors or less than optimal performance. This is what makes the idea of “pathing” – how I/O travels from VM to storage – critically important in the virtualized data center. Moving I/O across the lowest latency paths, and avoiding outages introduced by misconfiguration or error will ultimately determine whether the virtual data center holds up under pressure or not. Moreover, the secondary capabilities introduced by innovative pathing technologies can add even more value in complex infrastructures by enhancing management and increasing the efficiency of storage interaction.

Virtualization technology has had a transformational impact on computing domains: providing deep consolidation for servers, network fabrics, and the storage pools behind individual servers. Today, the range of capabilities has made it a natural development to weave virtualized computing into virtualized data centers. VMware is the market leader in this area and vSphere a leading product for virtualizing modern data centers.

This Product in Depth will detail the challenges around virtualizing the data center and how EMC‘s PowerPath/VE creates unique value for VMware virtual data centers.