VMware Storage and Software-defined Storage (SDS) Solutions Blog Posts Oregon State University, a public institution with more than 26,000 students and growing VDI workloads wanted a high performance storage tier for their VDI environment. However, they wanted the solution to be up and running before the school summer session began, along with being easy to operate and scale on an on-going basis, without requiring large upfront investments. Continue reading Welcome to the next installment of our vSphere PowerCLI 5.8 walkthrough series of the new cmdlets for vSphere Storage Policy Based Management. So far we have seen: Introduction to vSphere Storage Policies Creating vSphere Storage PoliciesAssociating vSphere Storage Policies In this article we will take the next step and illustrate how to leverage vSphere Storage Policies to enhance the provisioning of New VMs. PowerCLI cmdlets referenced in this blog article: New-VM Get-SpbmCompatibleStorage Get-SpbmEntityConfigurationSet-SpbmEntityConfiguration Using the vSphere Web ClientUsing PowerCLI Continue reading
Review: VMware Virtual SAN turns storage inside-out | InfoWorld Convergence of compute and storage is all the rage in the virtualization market these days. You see it in Microsoft's Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces. You see it in third-party platforms such as Nutanix. The goals behind Virtual SAN, or VSAN, are both to lower overall storage costs and to eliminate the I/O latencies associated with networked storage. [ Virtualization showdown: Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 vs. VSAN requires a minimum of three vSphere nodes to form a clustered data store. VSAN, at least in its initial release, targets a short list of use cases. For this review, I was provided with hardware from Supermicro and Lenovo. Note that the single HDD per node in the Lenovo cluster, while supported by VMware, is not recommended.
What kind of storage do people actually use for VMware ESX servers? Pure Storage Solutions- Super-Charging Your Application Performance- Vmware Server Consolidation Whether you’re a one-man do-it-all shop or a large enterprise with dedicated storage and VI admin teams, confusion always abounds when trying to manage the storage under VMware. Pure Storage’s vSphere Web Client plugin enables complete management of storage within VMware: automatically create, expand or shrink datastores without worrying about LUNs, see array-side capacity and performance of each datastore, and understand real storage usage through deduplication… all from a single web-based console. Block Storage that’s invisible under VMware No Configuration When all you want is a working datastore, why do you need to have a PhD in storage management to do the job? No Misalignment 512byte virtualization = always aligned Pure Storage natively virtualizes storage at the 512-byte block size, meaning that whatever VMDK and host OS/FS/application alignment you pick, you’ll always get the same consistent performance. Read more about how Pure Storage makes VM alignment irrelevant ›
VMware virtual servers offer advanced shared storage options Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and VMware Inc. all present IT shops with a variety of options to provision and manage the shared storage systems that are linked to their virtual server technology. Not surprisingly, VMware, the vendor with the most mature product in the market, offers the most advanced support for block- and file-based networked storage alternatives and makes available application programming interfaces (APIs) data storage vendors can use to ensure their systems will work smoothly with its virtual server software, noted Marc Staimer, president at Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, Ore. In this podcast interview, Staimer outlines VMware virtual servers, what VMware has done to improve the way its products work with storage, contrasts where Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer stand in comparison, and offers up advice on choosing the right data storage option for your virtual server environment. You can read the transcript below or download the MP3.