How to get the most benefit from server virtualization: Pitfalls and Countermeasures

Server virtualization can significantly improve hardware agility, flexibility, and efficiency for administrators, and to achieve these goals successfully, the surrounding architectures such as storage need to share these features. Industry insiders have described why advanced, virtualized, ip-based storage is the best way to solve these problems.

Virtualization is seen as a panacea for many of the enterprise's IT challenges. Virtualization seems to provide all the answers from enhanced application availability to simplified disaster recovery, as well as to reduced infrastructure and cost issues. Virtualization also seems to provide simplified IT management, even "greener" computing solutions.

However, to derive the greatest benefit from server virtualization, other elements of the infrastructure (especially storage) are important to compensate for the lack of virtualized environments. Otherwise, there will be many errors. The app would be surprisingly slow as crawling. An alternative to lower-cost computing would require a lot of investment to achieve all of its functions. The practice of using virtualization to improve the uptime of applications and servers suddenly exposes painful weaknesses in other aspects of the IT infrastructure. The following are the two most common pitfalls of enterprise implementation Server virtualization.

Trap 1: Select the wrong storage platform

One of the main benefits of server virtualization is the ability to move a client application that is in use between different server management programs. Whether this is done for scheduling, load balancing, or disaster recovery, hardware independence is one of the main drivers behind any virtualization implementation. However, if your storage is linked to specific server hardware, mobile applications can become more complex and even pointless.

Network-attached storage is often used as a way to simplify the storage configuration of virtual servers. Network-attached storage capacity is set very simply, and capacity expansion does not require the involvement of management programs. Unfortunately, there are performance weaknesses in using network-attached storage. Many applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, do not run at all using network-attached storage. For these reasons, most virtualization vendors will recommend storage LANs to people who seek more effective application performance.

Fibre Channel Storage LAN

With Fibre Channel storage LANs, users need to not only justify the increased costs of fibre Channel storage, transformation, and management, but they also need to configure expensive host bus adapters for each server they connect to the storage area network. Companies that apply existing Fibre Channel storage LANs will not encounter any obstacles. To gain significant benefits from server virtualization, this complete Fibre channel infrastructure, including switches and host bus adapters, requires support for the NPIV (n-Port ID virtualization) protocol. At present, most products do not contain npiv.

Even with Npiv,vmware, client programs can only be routed between machines in a Fibre Channel region. This means that while the user has acquired hardware independence for the server, all the physical servers in a team that can transfer client applications are not dependent on a single Fibre Channel region (usually an array or even a hard disk) for storage. Server-side hardware independence can cause dangerous, multiple-application hardware dependencies in storage.

Optimizing storage solutions for virtualized environments

ISCSI (Internet small Computer system interface) or IP SAN (IP storage LAN) provides the best storage solution in virtualized server environments, not only from the obvious cost advantage, but also from the availability, flexibility and scalability of the virtual architecture. An iSCSI SAN storage system can also provide an obvious advantage for businesses that use WAN disaster recovery virtualization. Snapshots can also be used at the storage level to replicate data to local or remote standby sites.

In addition, iSCSI storage LAN Storage systems have a significant WAN advantage over Fibre Channel storage LANs. Fibre Channel storage WAN replication requires the purchase of expensive FCIP (ip-Fibre Channel) gateways. WAN replication for iSCSI storage LAN storage does not require the purchase, application, operation, and management of additional systems. iSCSI is a TCP/IP protocol that works locally across a wide area network. Fibre Channel and iSCSI WAN replication can cause long distance throughput degradation or packet loss. The WAN or TCP/IP optimization device for iSCSI storage LAN storage can mitigate this problem. This WAN or TCP/IP optimization device has no impact on the Fcip gateway or has little impact.