Data Center storage virtualization five major considerations

Servers are a concern, but successful virtualization deployments depend on storage. Storage protects the state of a virtual machine, retains snapshots, and helps users access data in a shared application. Due to these features, availability, and performance factors, we have a high demand for the storage infrastructure. So administrators should understand the most critical data center storage virtualization considerations.

Data Center storage Virtualization one of the considerations: storage Performance

Administrators can now choose from a number of different storage platforms, such as iSCSI, Fibre Channel, network-attached storage, and Ethernet Fibre Channel. All of these platforms can be applied to the virtual environment, but they provide completely different scalability, performance, availability, and capacity features.

Storage performance is often considered a primary consideration because multiple virtual machines located on the same host have a high demand for storage bandwidth. If you run 10 virtual machines on a virtual server, you need to load all of these virtual machines from storage, periodically save the current state of each virtual machine in a snapshot, and provide the user with virtual machine data.

Storage performance must be able to meet these growing requirements, and it becomes imperative to choose a platform that meets the needs of the company. iSCSI Storage Area Networks (Sans), for example, can meet the needs of small and midsize companies, but large companies need Fibre Channel sans.

Data Center Storage Virtualization Considerations bis: Backup and disaster planning integration

The storage system needs to be backed up and protected through some of the ways in the disaster Recovery (DR) plan. Any newly added storage must be fully compatible with existing backup and Dr Software, such as local snapshots and remote replication tools. If not fully compatible, newly added storage may need to be forced to change (possibly causing errors) to meet existing data protection policies or add additional unnecessary tools to make data protection more complex. Lab testing usually ensures storage-system compatibility.

Data Center Storage Virtualization Considerations Three: Securing redundant storage access

Virtual data centers can have devastating consequences if there is a storage outage. If a traditional server fails, an application can be affected. But if a server that runs 10 or 20 virtual loads fails, it can have a greater impact on business applications and users.

As a result, redundant storage links for storage systems, SAN (or other network) switches and virtual servers must remain available in a virtualized environment. This requires the installation of redundant storage controllers on each server and storage system, and a well-designed San architecture. However, regardless of which storage schema is used, periodic validation of storage availability should also be part of a disaster recovery test.

Data Center Storage virtualization Considerations Four: Energy-saving storage

Running high-capacity and high-performance storage systems requires a lot of energy consumption, which is a huge cost to the system owner. Consider more energy-efficient storage systems that can provide higher input/output operations per second, and each watt of energy can provide higher bandwidth for active data. Energy-saving storage can also provide more capacity per watt for inactive (for example, archived) data. Archiving on energy-saving storage is usually achieved through the controller design and disk capacity/performance tradeoffs.

Data Center Storage Virtualization Considerations Five: Support Advanced storage Features

Some of the virtualization platforms can use advanced storage features, such as streamlined collaboration and data deduplication. Typically, storage systems that support these features can be used more efficiently by the virtualization platform. This mutual support can often simplify storage setup and management requirements.

Similarly, a new storage system in a virtualized platform is also important to support migration features. Virtual engines do not do this, such as migrating virtual machines from Fibre Channel to iSCSI and then to a network file system. This may limit the company's potential for storage-system selection. But other virtualization platforms, such as VMware vsphere 4, can move virtual machines between three storage protocols, allowing you to stop worrying about underlying storage systems.