What's Hot with VMware and NetApp:
Enhanced DR, Virtual Storage, NAS, and VDI
Highlights from VMworld 2007
This month thousands of people are visiting San Francisco to attend VMworld. At VMworld, NetApp sponsored a variety of presentations and hands-on labs, plus shared a slew of demos and new technical papers the team spent the past few months developing.
Some of the hottest topics at the show and in the NetApp booth included:
- Comprehensive data protection. NetApp technologies streamline backup, recovery, and disaster recovery across a wide range of different environments and help optimize network infrastructures through the use of unique intelligent data movement capabilities and space-saving features. Additionally, at VMworld NetApp unveiled a sneak preview of a NetApp and VMware co-developed failover utility that enables seamless disaster recovery for virtual machines.
- Storage efficiency and virtualization. VMware environments can consume a substantial amount of physical storage capacity. NetApp advanced RAID, data deduplication, and thin provisioning with policy-based space management capabilities can help significantly reduce provisioned yet unused storage.
- Shared infrastructure and cost savings with NAS. With Virtual Infrastructure 3, organizations can leverage ubiquitous low-cost Ethernet networks to present storage to ESX clusters. Network-attached storage (NAS) delivers simplicity and cost savings, and magnifies the benefits of storage virtualization and storage-based backup/recovery/replication tools.
- Cost-saving virtual desktop solutions. VMware and NetApp have partnered on and jointly presented a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution that reduces the storage and time to deploy requirements by 90% relative to traditional array-based solutions. At VMworld, NetApp demonstrated the deployment of 100 virtual desktops in under five minutes!
Because you're a Tech OnTap member, we're pleased to bring you early access to all of the brand-new technical reports and many of the demos and presentations NetApp shared at VMworld. If you weren't able to attend VMworld in person, this is definitely the next best thing.
1. Comprehensive Data Protection
Backing up and protecting data has become a hot-button issue in the virtualization community and is the number one pain point in large VMware environments. Consolidating tens of physical servers onto a single server often creates a disproportionate ratio of data to physical server bandwidth and can lead to artificial consolidation limits and drive up the number of servers required. As environments grow, traditional backup applications based on a backup agent per machine become increasingly difficult to manage and full backups of each individual VM start to consume excessive space.
NetApp offers a variety of tools enabling instantaneous-and potentially fully automated-backup creation that enables you to copy data off-site much more efficiently and cost effectively than with tape. Backups are streamlined with NetApp solutions to only send and store changed data blocks. Once on NetApp disk, data is immediately usable and can be exposed to a variety of advanced NetApp features for data management, including deduplication technologies and cloning capabilities.
NetApp also offers multiple options for implementing disaster recovery in VMware environments. NetApp SnapMirror® technology enables flexible and low-cost disaster recovery for existing NetApp users while NetApp ReplicatorXTM enables data replication and recovery across a broad range of platforms and storage systems.
Early access for Tech OnTap members:
- Disk-to-Disk Backup for NetApp/VMware (PDF - technical report)
A technical overview of how NetApp SnapVault® technology can be implemented to increase the storage availability of VMware ESX environments. Includes a detailed plan for the set up, configuration, and functional testing of a disk-to-disk backup environment.
- DR for VMware using NetApp SnapMirror and MetroCluster (PDF -technical report) A technical overview of the way NetApp disaster recovery technologies can be implemented to increase the availability of VMware ESX environments by providing protection at a local, campus, or regional level. Includes a detailed plan for the set up, configuration, and functional testing of a high-availability storage environment.
- Simply Addressing the DR Needs of Virtual Infrastructures
(VMworld presentation BC33 - PDF)
Reviews common deployments of SnapMirror with VMware Infrastructure 3, including using synchronous or asynchronous replication over IP or Fibre Channel connections and the flexibility of mixing FC and SATA disks in a replicated environment.
Plus, during the show NetApp shared a sneak peek into the future of disaster recovery for VMware environments. NetApp and VMware have co-developed a new failover utility that enables seamless automated discovery and failover for virtual machines.
Additional resources:
- Streamlined DR for VMware ESX in Heterogeneous Environments
(Tech OnTap article)
Real-world examples of the way IT teams have leveraged NetApp ReplicatorX to implement cost-effective disaster recovery across multi-vendor storage environments and migrate from ESX 2.1 to ESX 3.0 with only 25 minutes of downtime.
- SnapMirror: Behind the Music (Tech OnTap article)
One of the original NetApp SnapMirror engineers provides an overview of core product design and the way it is used in a cross-section of real-world deployments. Plus, discover the tricks that the professionals use to avoid or resolve common challenges.
2. Storage Efficiency and Virtualization
Organizations face various challenges when managing storage for their virtual infrastructure deployment. First, data redundancy is prevalent because VMware environments are typically deployed with templates: having 100 Windows® 2003 servers means you have 100 copies of identical OS and patch data. Second, VMware offers multiple layers of storage virtualization, each of which results in excess capacity. Consider this: If virtual disks and their underlying VMware data stores are all 70% full, the actual storage utilization is only 49%! Ouch!
Storage virtualization—specifically, virtualization using unique NetApp functionality—can address these challenges, significantly reducing provisioned yet unused storage. NetApp A-SIS deduplication, thin provisioning at the data-store level, and FlexClone® technology all allow storage admins to address more storage than is physically available and to significantly reduce storage costs.
Early access for Tech OnTap members:
- Best Practices for Implementing VMware VI3 with NetApp FAS Systems
(PDF - technical report)
Reviews deployment options involving VI3 with NetApp FAS systems and explores topics including NFS, FCP, iSCSI, VMFS, RDM, storage layouts, and more.
- Getting Familiar with NetApp Storage Virtualization Features (demo*)
An introduction to NetApp storage virtualization features including flexible volumes, thin-provisioning, and space management. Shows how users can rapidly provision and resize storage entities (FlexVols / LUNs / VMFS datastores) and thin-provision flexible volumes and LUNs. Finally, this demo addresses how space management policies eliminate risks associated with thin provisioning by allowing storage to respond to capacity growth.
- Rapidly Provisioning Multi-Use Copies of DataStores with FlexClone (demo*)
Shows how NetApp FlexClone technology enables the creation of thin-provisioned copies of datastores and the virtual machines they contain. This demo elaborates on how FlexClone technology is critical to data recovery of virtual disks or data and demonstrates how FlexClones streamline failover testing for VMware environments being replicated with SnapMirror.
- Eliminate data redundancy with NetApp A-SIS (demo*)
Shows how A-SIS deduplication reduces capacity requirements to house Virtual Machines. This demo illustrates the process of de-duplicating an existing datastore, reviews capacity savings after de-duplication, and explains how to schedule de-duplication. It also addresses the advantages that A-SIS brings when data is being replicated with SnapMirror.
Additional resources:
3. Shared Infrastructure and Cost Savings with NAS
With the incorporation of NFS into VI3, organizations can now leverage existing IP networks and NFS storage for VMware. When deployed using NetApp best practices, NFS-based data stores achieve high levels of redundancy and performance.
Further, NFS delivers space efficiencies through automatic thin provisioning of VMs, removal of the file system layer (VMFS), and the ability to deploy more virtual machines per data store. Finally, NFS data stores enable more flexible recovery and streamlined data replication using storage-based tools.
Early access for Tech OnTap members:
- Building Virtual Infrastructures with NAS (VMworld presentation IP43)
This presentation deck demonstrates how implementing VMware VI3 with NAS simplifies storage provisioning, streamlines virtual machine deployment, and enables instantaneous backup and recovery. This presentation also includes a case study detailing a real-world VMware VI3 on NAS deployment.
Additional resources:
- Virtual Reality: An Architecture Capable of Evolving in Any Direction
(Tech OnTap article)
See how one IT team built a fully virtual software-as-a-service architecture. Includes a discussion on the various protocols the team evaluated, pros and cons, and why the team decided to implement VMware on NAS.
- VMware over NFS (Blog post)
NetApp consulting systems engineer and SAN specialist Nick Triantos recently blogged about his experience testing out NFS over VMware. His post shares observations about throughput, latency, thin provisioning, utilization, and more.
4. Cost-Effective Desktop Virtualization
VMware and NetApp have partnered on and jointly presented a VDI solution that reduces storage and time to deploy requirements by 90% relative to traditional array-based solutions.
Early access for Tech OnTap members:
- Deploying VDI with NetApp FAS Systems (PDF - technical report)
Technical overview of the architecture and benefits of deploying VDI on NetApp FAS systems.
- Optimizing Storage for Virtual Desktops (VMworld presentation DV16)
A look at the way NetApp storage can drive down costs and management of a virtual desktop solution. Also investigates how A-SIS (Advanced Single Instance Storage) deduplication and FlexClone technology can help minimize storage requirements and ease patch management.
- VMware VDI on NetApp (demo*)
See the power of VDI on NetApp with the deployment of 100 virtual desktops in under five minutes!
* Demo may take a few seconds to load; please be patient.
