The Complexity of VMware Storage Management

The Complexity of VMware Storage Management, from Isilon System. There is a new paper from Isilon (divission of EMC) with as a subject Complexity of VMware storage management. Did you know that other protocols other than FC were introduced by VMware into ESX 3.0 only? Protocols like iSCSI or NAS which can be used to connect to shared storage though IP network.

Setting up shared storage for an through NAS device average IT administrator is far less complex than doing the same thing through FC. Sharing files through NAS devices has been here for decades, but only recently (with ESX 3.0 as mentioned above) it started to get the momentum in clustered VMware Environment.

In fact, depending on the size of enterprise you working in, or projects you're working on, the storage management differs, depending on the hardware, protocols,  and also the storage management you're using.

This Whitepaper is provided by Storage Switzerland: The Complexity of VMware Storage Management.

Here is a quick quote:

A traditional SAN, where the servers connecting to it have only one application installed on them, are not required to share the volumes assigned to them on the SAN with any other server.

In fact, that’s the preferred configuration. A server that is going to act as a virtualization host, on the other hand, will have multiple applications (usually in multiple VMs) on it and be required to share access to its volumes with other physical hosts within the infrastructure.

In a fibre SAN environment this is managed by a clustered file system, in the VMware case with VMFS. While VMware has made working with a clustered SAN file system a task ‘attainable by mere mortals’ it does require that the fairly sophisticated SAN infrastructure be properly set up. 

Download the paper from this link: The Complexity of VMware Storage Management.