What’s Virtualization-Aware Storage?

Virtualized server environments have made major progress in enabling shared network storage. But even technologies such as VMware’s vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) come up short in providing enterprise customers with the tools needed to optimize their storage infrastructure.

What’s required is a new class of storage array called Virtualization-Aware Storage, according to Tegile Systems, Inc., provider of hybrid storage arrays for virtualized server and virtual desktop environments.

Virtualization-aware storage enables enterprise customers to discover hidden performance details about their VMs so that they can answer questions such as:

• Which VM is demanding the most IO/s out of the shared storage?
• Which VM is achieving the best cache hit ratio?
• Which VM has the best deduplication rate?

The answers won’t be found in vCenter or in traditional storage arrays that aren’t VM-aware. However, answers to these questions are important and will help users in their ongoing efforts to maintain a system that meets performance expectations.

Here are five reasons
why users need virtualization-aware storage
in their company’s environment:

1. Connect your storage and your virtual infrastructure to correlate VM and storage data: No IT environment runs perfectly 100% of the time. Outages and performance issues will arise from time to time and it becomes the job of the systems administrator to determine the root cause for these issues and to take appropriate action. However, troubleshooting requires an administrator to be able to determine cause and effect. With VM-aware storage, administrators gain the ability to correlate VM and storage performance, which can greatly aid in troubleshooting.
2. Learn IO/s per VM that will allow you to solve problems and plan capacity: As an administrator moves mission-critical workloads to the virtual environment, worries over the ability for shared storage to keep pace may arise. With VM-aware storage, administrators know right down to the VM and LUN how many IO/s are being consumed by specific workloads, greatly streamlining what can be a chaotic troubleshooting process.
3. Plan long-term capacity so you will know the total I/O utilization of the virtual infrastructure: Ongoing capacity planning often goes by the wayside. After all, capacity planning for many is a ‘would be nice if’ undertaking that can require a great deal of monitoring and tracking in order to determine the current workload both right now and over time. With VM-aware storage, administrators gain at-a-glance dashboards that provide immediate insight into this metric, making capacity planning a breeze. Administrators are able to immediately determine whether or not the current storage system is keeping up with environment needs.
4. Understand deduplication and compression rates on a per-VM basis: It’s a fact that storage performance is extremely important, but capacity is generally important to people, too. Running out of disk space makes for a really bad day. Today, prime players in the storage space include powerful deduplication technologies that help customers extend the life of one of their most expensive data center assets. Through the use of deduplication and compression, organizations can achieve usable storage gains orders or magnitude beyond raw capacity. But, it’s still important to know just how much disk space each asset is using. This is a critical component of ongoing capacity planning. For storage, capacity and IO/s are the critical metrics that require monitoring and planning. With VM-aware storage, an administrator knows instantly exactly how much benefit deduplication and compression are bringing to each individual VM. This is important information to understand for backup and DR purposes or just to gain an understanding for how much actual raw capacity is in use.
5. Simplify virtualization storage configuration: As more vendors bring virtualization awareness to their storage, they are also bringing to the environment new and powerful tools that greatly simplify the storage management paradigm. This includes adding storage management features right into the vCenter or the vSphere Web Client. From these newly-integrated tools, administrators can get full one-stop-shop administration of the full environment, from the highest-level cluster to the lowest level LUN. With this deep integration comes additional ease of use, quicker problem resolution, and a lower TCO.

Virtualization-aware storage is becoming an increasingly important part of the modern data center. Administrators need the powerful tools and information that VM-aware storage brings. Through the inclusion of per VM statistics and a powerful add-in for the vSphere web client.