Increasingly, enterprises are turning to server virtualization to enhance IT flexibility while reducing costs. Server virtualization solutions such as VMware Infrastructure software help to achieve those goals by abstracting applications from physical resources. With VMware, administrators can run multiple applications on the same physical machine. As a result, VMware helps increase resource utilization, accelerate the provisioning of new applications, simplify server management and improve disaster recovery.
The Compellent Storage Center storage area network (SAN) is a perfect complement to the VMware environment because virtualized storage offers significant and complimentary benefits to virtualized applications. By creating a pool of virtual storage volumes, the Compellent SAN provides the flexibility to change or move storage attributes without affecting how storage is presented to the server. The Compellent SAN reduces the overall storage capacity needed to support a VMware environment, speeds up storage provisioning, simplifies storage management, enhances disaster recovery and reduces the cost of acquisition, operation and management.
Like the VMware environment, the Compellent SAN abstracts storage attributes from physical hardware. Storage is presented to virtual servers as disk capacity, regardless of the mix of disk types, disk capacities and server connectivity selected by administrators. As a result, administrators have the same sort of flexibility in making changes to virtual storage volumes as they do with virtual machines (VMs). They can change RAID levels, storage tiers and server connectivity without changing how storage is presented to servers.
By using VMware and the Compellent SAN together, enterprises can compound the benefits of virtualization. This paper addresses the following technical advantages and describes how they allow the Compellent SAN to optimize VMware server virtualization:
- Thin Provisioning Conserves Storage Capacity
- Automated Tiered Storage Maximizes VM Storage Performance and Efficiency
- Server Instant Replay Minimizes the Capacity Needed for VM Clones
- Automatic LUN Masking Accelerates VM Storage Provisioning
