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Making
Sense of Storage Virtualization
1, 2, 3,
4, 5
MANAGEMENT CONSIDERATIONS
FOR APPLIANCE-BASED
VIRTUALIZATION
Today’s SAN management and
monitoring applications can
present challenges to any virtualization
system that’s not implemented
at the host level. Since these
tools can no longer communicate directly
to the storage subsystems via
Fibre Channel, they could eliminate the
ability to manage and receive alerts with some
vendors’ sub-systems. Applications for
remote data replication and point-in-time
backups present additional complexities—possibly
to the point of inoperability.
As a result, these types of functions
are best accomplished through the
appliance.
Virtualization appliances are
designed to be the management
platform. They treat hosts and
storage subsystems as commodities
and perform all functions as a
third-party overseer. They eliminate vendor-specific
management by handling RAID
levels, point-in-time back-ups, remote
replication, LUN masking, and
security.
ADDITIONAL VIRTUALIZATION
FEATURES
A comprehensive
virtualization implementation requires
the creation of diskpools and
more importantly, disk pools with specific
functionality.
A virtualization tool should
have the ability to create
multiple disk pools defined by
protection level, physical location, storage
cost, and/or performance level. Multipathing,
or the ability to have a single
host see the same disks down multiple
paths, is also critical to a successful virtualization
implementation.
This can be accomplished in
Active/ Passive or
Active/Active mode. In Active/ Passive
mode, multipathing accommodates hardware
failures such as a Host Bus
Adapter (HBA), switch, or cable without
the loss of service.
In Active/ Active
mode, the same level of redundancy is
in place, and since the host can use
multiple paths to access the same disk, an
increase in performance is possible.
Another key feature for any
virtualization plan is the
ability to support snap-shot functionality
without the necessity of
dedicating large amounts of storage to
the process. The virtualization configuration should
also allow for multiple snapshots
of the same LUN(s).
Finally, the selected
virtualization tool should be
able to perform remote replication utilizing
Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet,
or any other standard remote-site connectivity
method.
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