Virtual View for VMware

The Advent of Virtual server technology, such as VMware^® ESX Server, offers tremendous benefits for your data center, including:

• Reduced physical server footprint and power requirements
• Increased server utilization
• Reduced planned and unplanned downtime
• Faster, easier deployment of applications and operating systems

While these efficiencies bring a wealth of benefits—lower capital and operating costs, for example—they do not come without a price. As your virtual server environment grows, so do the challenges of managing shared storage across a large number of virtual machines (VMs) running on multiple physical hosts.

Storage Challenges with Virtual Servers

With most storage area network (SAN) systems available today, you must perform multiple steps from three management points in order to provision storage and make it available to VMs. In addition, mapping out the relationships among the storage, VMs, and hosts can be quite complicated, particularly in larger virtual environments.

Multiple Management Points
Traditionally, provisioning storage for virtual servers forces you to perform multiple tasks at three different management points (Fig. 1):

• Storage system
• ESX servers and clusters (physical servers)
• Individual VMs

Mastering storage provisioning can be a challenge, especially as your VMware environment grows. The process requires a dozen or more time-consuming steps across all three of the storage management points—sometimes repeating steps if the first attempt is unsuccessful (Fig. 2). Missing any step, especially with deployed VMware clusters, may be disastrous to your expected application environment.

At a high level, here are the steps you must perform:

• Storage System Operations
• Create, expand, and delete disk storage (virtual disks or VDisks)
• Assign disk storage as a LUN to specific physical storage initiators (FC or iSCSI ports) on each ESX server
• Physical ESX Server or Cluster Operations
• Scan the I/O bus for new VDisks; rescan the bus if necessary
• Create, expand, and delete VMFS volumes (Datastores) at the ESX server
• Create VM disk files (VMDKs) or links to Raw Device Mapped (RDM) devices to be presented to VMs
• Individual VM Operations
• Scan the virtual I/O bus for new VDisks
• Create or expand volumes
• Mount and assign drive letters
• Delete Native Operating System volumes

Tracking Storage Objects
Mapping storage from VMware's Virtual Center and ESX servers is easy enough at the start of your deployment. However, as your VM environment grows, management can soon get out of control.

It is very important that you put practices into place to continually document the three storage management points described above. Otherwise, changes within these environments could create undue risk to your data or to availability of that data.

Imagine you have multiple VMs assigned to a single VMFS volume that is concatenated across multiple storage system VDisks. Removing one of the VDisks that make up that single VMFS volume is disastrous—not only to a single VM but across all VMs that were provisioned across the VMFS volume.

Clustering of VMs is another area that requires particular attention to detail. If you do not properly assign storage and discover the storage across all participating nodes in a VMware cluster, VM failover or migration may not work correctly—putting your data at serious risk during an unexpected outage.

From Three Interfaces to as Few as Three Clicks

As a pioneer in storage virtualization, Xiotech understands and embraces the goals of server virtualization technology, including VMware's Virtual Infrastructure. Xiotech, therefore, is committed to optimizing how these two technologies work together.

Xiotech's virtual storage systems—Magnitude 3D^® 4000 and Emprise^™ 7000—provide easy-to-manage, reliable shared storage for your VMware environment. Some of the benefits of integrating Xiotech's storage with VMware ESX Server are described later in this paper. But first, let's look at Xiotech's latest innovation: Virtual View for VMware.

Virtual View for VMware is a free plug-in for Xiotech's exclusive ICON Manager user interface. ICON Manager already provides the easiest storage management available anywhere. For instance, with ICON Manager's Server View, you can explore, provision, and manage all of your Windows 2003 servers and their volumes from a single interface. Server View reduces the two typical storage management points (storage and server) to one unified interface that enables you to create new volumes in three clicks and expand them in two.

Virtual View for VMware applies this same philosophy to managing storage in VMware environments. With Virtual View you can easily explore your VMware infrastructure and map the relationships among storage, servers, and VMs (Fig. 3). You also can safely and rapidly provision, monitor, and manage storage with just a few clicks from a single interface (Fig. 4).¹

Virtual View for VMware saves you time, removes the requirement and risk of working with multiple storage management points, and—through integrated best practices—helps you make the right storage deployment choices for your applications.

Virtual View is an essential storage management tool for novice administrators and experienced professionals alike. It reduces the learning curve for provisioning storage, while providing a safe, efficient way to monitor and manage your growing virtual server environment.

Virtual View for VMware:

• Enumerates and maps all VMware systems, storage relationships, and their properties in a unified view (Fig. 3).
• Xiotech VDisks
• VMFS volumes
• VMDKs
• Provides end-to-end storage provisioning from a single interface.¹ Specifically, Virtual View automates:
• Creation and expansion of VDisks
• Assignment of LUNs
• VMFS creation for ESX servers and clusters
• VMDK or RDM creation
• Volume creation for Windows 2003 servers
• Delivers easy ongoing monitoring and management of your VMware storage.
• Integrates best practices to reduce errors and ensure best performance. Virtual View:
• Ensures that storage is accessible by all VMware cluster nodes
• Ensures that storage expansion is done within a single VDisk to eliminate risks associated with LUN concatenation
• Helps you select whether to use VMware VMDK or RDM storage

Xiotech's Virtual Storage with VMware Virtual Infrastructure
Xiotech's storage solutions integrate flawlessly with VMware Virtual Infrastructure and provide tangible benefits that no other storage systems can match.

For instance, optimal storage virtualization and a distributed cluster architecture deliver the reliability that keeps your VMware environment online and available. The Emprise 7000 system also features Xiotech's revolutionary Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, which provides more than 100 times the reliability of traditional disk drives—along with unbeatable performance and scalability.

Here is a closer look at some of the ways Xiotech's virtual storage complements your VMware deployment.

• High availability and VM mobility.
  Xiotech's systems provide a perfect storage foundation for VMware's high availability and mobility features, such as VMware HA, VMware VMotion, and VMware DRS. These features require all ESX servers participating in the cluster to have simul taneous access to the same storage volumes.



• Live storage mobility of VDisks between storage tiers.
  Xiotech's virtual storage enables you to move VMFS volumes from low-cost repository storage (e.g., SATA) to higherperformance storage (e.g., Fibre Channel or solid state disk) transparently, without interruption to your VMware environment. This works much the way VMware VMotion enables you to, manually or automatically (through VMware DRS), move VMs from one ESX server to another without application downtime.



• Efficient and cost-effective use of storage resources.Xiotech's storage systems virtualize all disk drives into a single resource pool. You can provision just what you need rapidly and without the waste normally associated with standard RAID systems.



• Fast VM deployment.Xiotech's virtualization and ICON Manager with Virtual View enable you to create storage and assign it to ESX servers rapidly. Additionally, Web Services APIs provided by both VMware and Xiotech (via ICON Services) enable you to integrate and automate deployment for efficiencies not found with any other storage system.

Conclusion

Virtual View for VMware demonstrates Xiotech's commitment to and continued innovation in providing easy-to-manage, reliable, and adaptable storage solutions for your VMware Virtual Infrastructure. Virtual View takes this a step further—significantly reducing the time and complexity of provisioning and managing storage in virtual server environments. Now you can realize all the benefits of a fully virtualized storage and server environment, from increased efficiency and less downtime to lower capital and operating expenses.