Worldwide

DataCore in VMware Environments

VMware® Use Case Scenarios

Some business challenges that we can help with:

  • Finding it unaffordable to put in place the highly-available, shared storage required to support a VMware vSphere and/or VMware View desktop virtualization project.
  • Experiencing frequent disruptions attributed to storage. For example, outages are required to expand capacity, take backups, resize volumes, swap out disk drives, upgrade equipment and migrate data to different equipment.
  • Applications and virtual machines run slowly. Problems can be traced to disk I/O bottlenecks and programs running out of disk space because 5 to 15 times more workloads are competing for the same storage resources.
  • High risk of losing critical information due to major and mini disasters that damage or impair storage hardware. Such a loss might jeopardize the organization’s ability to continue IT operations and lead to business collapse.
  • Budget cuts impeding rollout of adequate SAN to support server consolidation.
Scenario 1:
Midsize (Less than 10 Terabytes) shared storage requirement for VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

Challenge:
You are eager to take advantage of non-disruptive live migrations and VM auto-failover between physical servers, but your direct-attached storage cannot be shared. You have also determined that multiple VMs on the same physical server are generating far more disk I/Os and throughput than its storage equipment can handle. The cost to implement SAN approaches proposed by others exceeds your budget.

Solution:
Configure DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage virtualization software on a pair of network servers that will be repurposed during the server virtualization project. These “universal storage controllers” form a centrally-managed, virtual storage pool by drawing disk space from their internal drives as well as any arrays externally attached to them. Serve shared storage for high-availability using the built-in synchronous mirroring feature. The software will use the CPUs and memory on the DataCore storage controllers as high-speed cache to handle the I/Os and throughput placed on the SAN by aggregated VMs.
Scenario 2:
Large (greater than 100 Terabytes) VMware vSphere and VMware View configuration split across two sites.

Challenge:
Remote and local users are experiencing frequent outages and very poor application response from their virtual desktops. The problems have been isolated to a) bottlenecks in the back-end disk farms and b) the need to interrupt applications when making storage-related changes. Regulatory pressures have now made disaster recovery a priority.

Solution:
Place the disk farms under the control of DataCore SANsymphony™-V storage virtualization software running on network servers to front-end the existing SAN. Configure the software for thin provisioning and synchronously mirror virtual disks between the DataCore universal storage controllers. Any storage-related changes going forward can now take place non-disruptively and the software will automatically provision just enough space, just-in-time. In the process, set up the software to automatically replicate virtual disks asynchronously between sites over an IP network to underpin your disaster recovery solution.