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Shared access to application data for XenServer Virtual Machines
Melio Data Center product suite can be installed on the XenServer guest servers to enable shared access to application data on a SAN volume, and improved management of SAN storage resources. Five virtual machine licenses are included, and additional licenses are available for $495/virtual server.
XenServer is an efficient hypervisor that includes the capability to migrate active virtual machines across physical hosts using a feature call XenMotion. This is accomplished by using “resource pools” of host servers and shared storage, where file level lock access is controlled by one server in the pool—the “master server”. Sanbolic’s software allows multiple XenServer virtual machines to have concurrent read-write access to application data on a SAN volume. The provides improved data access for application availability, and the ability to scale out an application by adding additional VMs accessing a single copy of data on block storage.
Melio Data Center Product Suite can be installed on the Citrix XenServer guest servers to enable shared access to application data on a SAN volume.
Virtual machines running on Ctrix XenServer can use local storage for application data. The virtual machines can also directly mount an iSCSI volume. Utilizing a separate SAN storage volume for application data provides better scalability and flexibility of data management across physical and virtual servers in the data center. When an application data volume is formatted with NTFS, it can be accessed by only one virtual machine. However, Melio Data Center Product Suite can be installed on the virtual machines and used to provide shared access to application data volumes, enabling concurrent read and write access from multiple physical or virtual servers.
Key advantages of shared access to application data from guest servers:
• Multiple paths to the data for availability
• Multiple virtual servers to run the same application using the same data for scalability
• High performance shared data for multi-tier applications.
Providing flexible shared access to application data for virtual machines is a key building block for data center agility. Using local storage for XenServer guest servers comes with the same limitations that have driven enterprises away from DAS storage for physical servers over the past decade. Pass through disks provide better storage performance but at the expense of coupling virtual machines tightly to specific physical storage assets. This means that each guest OS will have to have its own storage partition on a SAN, which cannot be shared. As a result each physical host server supporting 10 VMs will require provisioning at least 10 separate SAN LUNs for application data. Melio and LaScala simplify virtualization deployments by allowing storage to be centrally managed as a single virtual pool of data, and by allowing volumes to be easily reassigned or shared among application servers on physical or virtual machines.
Sanbolic Data Center Suite provides shared resources to multiple virtual guest servers, enabling the storage assets to be virtualized, centrally managed and flexibly assigned or shared. Shared access and flexible assignment of the virtual storage pool greatly facilitates application availability, and allows server AND application data resources to be flexibly assigned in response to workload demands. Workloads can be consolidated on a single server, or a workload can span multiple servers, enabling a scale-out architecture which aggregates multiple physical or virtual machines to respond to increased traffic levels. This greatly enhances the benefits of virtualization. Because all the servers have access to files simultaneously, administrators can flexibly respond to changes in traffic and workload.
Sanbolic’s products simplify storage architecture and are key enabling technologies for moving from inflexible and often proprietary storage/server/application silos to flexible virtualized data center infrastructure. Sanbolic’s software supports Microsoft Active Directory and Windows Security, Network Load Balancing, and Distributed File System, further simplifying application deployment. Melio also provides enterprise storage management features such as reporting of I/O and transaction performance at each node and quality of service assignment by node, which can be used when storage bandwidth is constrained.
Sanbolic Data Center Suite also now includes AppCluster, which allows virtual or physical machines running SQL Server to be easily configured into active-active clusters for availability and load balancing, without a dependency on Windows Failover Clustering. See SQL Server Solutions. The suite also includes FilerScaler, which allow physical or virtual Windows File Servers to be easily configured and managed from a single interface, and to easily be clustered using Melio Clustered file system to provide scale-out NAS solutions using standard windows sewers and SAN storage. See FilerScaler |
