F5 Acopia and VMware Solutions Note
Highlights Marry Benefits from Server and File Virtualization with F5 Acopia and VMware . Simplified storage provisioning and improved storage utilization for Networked attached storage (NAS) is increasingly becoming the storage infrastructure of VMware datastores choice for new VMware deployments today. NAS offers several advantages over traditional . Transparent real-time performance load SAN storage, including lower network costs and easier provisioning for VMware datastores, balancing to distribute I/O loads across with a potential tradeoff in I/O performance. F5 Acopia FreedomFabric network operating multiple storage resources system software uniquely complements VMware Infrastructure 3 in NAS environments, expanding the ease of provisioning and increasing availability of virtual machines, while . Transparent capacity load balancing addressing the performance challenges of VMware on NAS.to distribute virtual machines across multiple storage resources for increased The NAS Advantageavailability VMware administrators have several options for the storage housing their virtual machines - FC, iSCSI, and NAS. FC and iSCSI SANs support either VMFS or raw device mapping . Reduced storage costs for virtual (RDM) for VMware datastores, while NAS supports NFS. The following table describes the machines through storage tiering tradeoffs of each:
SAN Pros ConsVMFS User familiarity - VMFS is Admins must manage the default option; easy a collection of LUNs; provisioning of storage flat namespace requires within the ESX Server exposing every LUN to every possible server host; degraded performance scaling as additional virtual machines are added within a single datastoreRDM High I/O performance Limited to 256 virtual possible machines; requires close coordination between VMware and storage administrators; admins must manage a collection of LUNs; flat namespace requires exposing every LUN to every possible server hostNFS Lower port costs of Potential of lower I/O Ethernet; easy provisioning performanceof storage within the ESX Server; simplified management of a file system instead of LUNs, including inherent security controls; advanced NAS features such as thin provisioning, snapshots, file-based replicationFor enterprise VMware deployments with large numbers of virtual do all of their applications. But the same applies to their virtual machines, the simplified management of NAS makes it an attractive machine storage - if the entire datastore resides on a single storage option despite the potential performance tradeoff, except for the resource, the loss of that resource will cause all of the virtual most I/O sensitive applications. machines and applications to fail. With Acopia, administrators can increase the availability of their virtual environment by Easy Provisioning of Servers and Storage transparently balancing their virtual machines across multiple For VMware administrators, a constant challenge in managing their storage resources.virtual environments is the difficulty of provisioning new storage for their virtual servers. Typically, administrators over-provision storage Reducing Costs through Storage Tieringfor the datastore to handle individual virtual machine growth. Virtual machine images can be pervasive and persistent with However, in addition to reducing storage utilization, handling large amounts of storage dedicated to inactive copies. VMware rapid growth across multiple virtual machines is often difficult as administrators often configure and optimize each virtual machine provisioning additional storage for the datastore requires them to for a single application. Each configuration will have a "gold disk", create and add new drive partitions as extents to VMFS. With NAS, or master copy, as well as an image for each individual machine the datastore is an NFS mount. Acopia intelligent file virtualization running that application. Often, these applications are required can easily, seamlessly and rapidly provision new storage to only some of the time and older images are not deleted, consuming virtualized NFS datastores as needed, making it as simple to valuable space on high performance storage. Acopia can migrate provision new storage as servers. This allows administrators to pre- these inactive virtual machine images to a lower cost storage allocate less storage for datastores upfront, increasing the overall tier, allowing administ... [download for more]
