Skip to main content

Storage Virtualization: Q&As

What does storage virtualisation do for me?

Storage virtualisation is a technique used throughout IT environments to simplify what tends to be a relatively complex underlying infrastructure.

The idea is to separate the logical presentation of a resource from its physical implementation — presenting a simplified, seamless virtual view
of the resource to applications and administrators.

Where should storage virtualisation live?

The software that virtualises storage can be run in a variety of locations.
Generally, the three most common locations are on a server, on a storage
device or in the storage network.

The storage network is receiving the most focus because it has the advantage of being able to support any connected server platform and any connected
storage device. The next question that usually follows is...

Should I choose an in-band or out of band solution?

Some vendors want to make a big deal about the technical path they took to implement virtualisation. The more important question is “as a customer, what results do you expect to achieve from virtualisation?”

The answer will guide you to an implementation. Today, only in-band implementations have the ability to deliver this full set of virtualisation value. The smart thing to do is first decide what results you are looking for and then evaluate the solution based on how well they match your goals.

How can I avoid vendor lock-in?

The best way to avoid vendor lockin is to virtualise the complete disk experience. If a vendor can get you to integrate your disaster recovery procedures to his proprietary replication services, or get you to load his proprietary multi-path device driver on all of your servers, or train all your
administrators on his proprietary management interface, he knows your
switching costs will be high — and you are locked in.

If, however, you choose to virtualise your complete disk experience, you give yourself complete flexibility of choice in what underlying disk hardware you choose. And that flexibility will often result in lower
overall costs.
Link

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus

OS Virtualization comparison: Parallels' Virtuozzo vs the rest

Virtuozzo's main differentiators versus hypervisors center on overhead, virtualization flexibility, administration and cost. Virtuozzo requires significantly less overhead than hypervisor solutions, generally in the range of 1% to 5% compared with 7% to 25% for most hypervisors, leaving more of the system available to run user workloads. Customers can also virtualize a wider range of applications using Virtuozzo, including transactional databases, which often suffer from performance problems when used with hypervisors. On the administration side, customers need to manage, maintain and secure just a single OS instance, while the hypervisor model requires customers to manage many OS instances. Of course, the hypervisor vendors have worked hard to automate much of this process, but it still requires more effort to manage and maintain multiple operating systems than a single instance. Finally, OS virtualization with Virtuozzo has a lower list price than the leading hypervisor for comme...