Using Microsoft Hyper-V with shared storage, virtual machines can be moved dynamically among Hyper-V hosts to enhance utilization of underlying server resources (i.e., CPU, memory, network, etc.), reduce system downtime and lower operating costs.
By virtualizing your storage infrastructure, similar benefits may be realized for your storage, including enhanced utilization of storage resources, improved flexibility and scalability, and greatly simplified storage management.
Offering data centers a very flexible architecture, virtual storage provided by Sanbolic Melio 2010 allows storage resources to be assigned quickly and easily across servers in response to computing needs and enables rapid migration of virtual machines across Hyper-V host nodes.
Deploying Microsoft Hyper-V with Sanbolic Melio 2010 allows organizations to achieve the greatest return on their investments in virtualization.
Key benefits of Sanbolic’s shared storage solutions with Hyper-V:
Hyper-V virtual machine images can be stored on a single shared volume on SAN storage, enabling any virtual machine to be easily and quickly migrated to any physical host server. Melio 2010 is fully integrated with Windows Hyper-V Failover Clustering and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2.
Windows guest servers running on Hyper-V can share concurrent, block-level read and write access to application data on a SAN volume, providing multiple paths to data to improve the performance, scalability and availability of multi-tier applications.
Enterprise reporting on storage I/O and transaction performance facilitates optimization of storage intensive workloads. Quality of service assignment allows prioritization of defined virtual machines or processes in storage bandwidth-constrained environments, removing a major obstacle in today’s storage infrastructures.
Optimized for High I/O virtual machine workloads and large-size host clusters, i.e., support for up to 256 nodes and 16 failover clusters.
Rapid, seamless scale out of your shared storage to reduce downtime, administration, and over-provisioning.
Centralized data and storage management, storage QoS and snapshot capability to manage and backup any VM from any hypervisor in the cluster.
Complete integration with Microsoft Windows Deployment Services for dynamic provisioning, deployment and VDI installations.
Enterprise Clustered File System for Hyper-V
Supports Live Migration, provides flexible backup options, improves performance and scalability
Sanbolic’s Melio Virtualization Suite can be used with Hyper-V to provide a shared LUN to all host servers for virtual machine files, providing improved scalability and performance, as well as VSS-based snapshot capability. In addition, Melio DataCenter Suite can be installed on Hyper-V guest servers to provide concurrent read-write access to application data on a SAN, as well as features such as remote volume management and Quality of Service management. This functionality is not available from Microsoft or VMware.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V is Microsoft’s hypervisor-based server virtualization solution, which is available as part of select versions of Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and Datacenter editions also provide integrated failover clustering at no additional charge, when used in combination with Hyper-V allows customers to move virtual servers between physical hosts. Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V adds the ability to use Live Migration to move virtual machines, in addition to the Quick Migration available with the first release of Hyper-V. Although Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V does not include a cluster file system like VMware’s VMFS, it has added Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV). CSV uses a metadata controller to allow multiple servers to mount a single LUN formatted with NTFS (which is not a clustered file system) for the Hyper-V workload only. This allows users to avoid the need to configure a separate storage LUN for each virtual machine, as was required in the initial Hyper-V release.
Sanbolic’s Melio product suites can be used instead of CSV to provide an easy to install, high performance, clustered file system for Hyper-V, together with backup and storage infrastructure management features not available with VMware vSphere. The product suite for basic shared LUN and snapshot capability using Melio clustered file system starts at $249 per Hyper-V host.
Key benefits of Sanbolic’s shared storage solutions with Hyper-V:
Hyper-V virtual machine images can be stored on a single shared volume on SAN storage, enabling any virtual machine to be easily and quickly moved to any physical host server. Live Migration is supported. Windows Hyper-V failover clustering recognizes Sanbolic’s software as an active-active storage resource and configures it appropriately. System Center Virtual Machines Manager 2008 R2 is also supported.
Host clusters of up to 256 nodes are supported. Multiple Hyper-V failover clusters can be configured using a single LUN. High I/O virtual machine workloads are supported.
Backup software that supports VSS can backup any VM from any hypervisor in the cluster. The backup can include VMs running on other hypervisors.
Supports network access to the shared volume via CIFS or NFS
Windows guest servers running on Hyper-V can have concurrent shared read and write access to application data on a SAN volume, providing multiple paths to the data, application scalability, and improved performance for multi-tier applications.
Multiple storage arrays can be aggregated into a single pool of storage that can be configured and assigned centrally using a simple intuitive interface. Volumes can be dynamically expanded.
Reporting on storage I/O and transaction performance facilitates optimization of storage intensive workloads. The file system also incorporates quality of service assignment to allow prioritization of defined virtual machines or processes in storage bandwidth-constrained environments.
Sanbolic’s clustered file system and volume manager are very easy to install and manage, and can be used with any industry standard iSCSI or fibre channel storage hardware.
Melio FS provides a shared LUN to all Hyper-V hosts for virtual machine files and can provide a shared LUN to guest servers for application data.
Shared LUN Solution for Hyper-V
Melio Virtualization Suite can be used instead of Shared Clustered Volumes to provide a shared LUN solution for Server 2008 Hyper-V R2. This simplifies storage management while supporting Live Migration and high I/O workloads on the virtual servers. Melio virtualization costs $249 per host server and can support up to 256 hosts accessing single SAN LUN.
Melio Virtualization installs easily using a “next-next-next” installer and can be used with any Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage hardware. It incorporates a clustered file system and volume manager designed specifically for shared access to SAN storage, and it is very intuitive to configure and manage. There is no volume or file size limitation. All Hyper-V hosts have concurrent read write access to the LUN containing the .VHD files over the SAN fabric. The distributed lock manager has been optimized for the Hyper-V workload, so the performance will reflect that of the SAN hardware being used.
Server 2008 R2 failover clustering recognizes Sanbolic’s software as an active-active storage resource and configures it appropriately, simplifying deployment. Melio Virtualization Suite is also filly compatible with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.
Backup options for Hyper-V deployments are an important consideration. Melio Virtualization incorporates a VSS-based snapshot capability, so snaps of the entire file system or any individual VHD can be made from a single host. The snapshots can be copied or migrated using the policy-based file and snapshot migration functionality of Melio Virtualization, or can be accessed by any VSS-based backup software.
Melio Virtualization Suite can be easily upgrade to Melio Data Center Suite to add additional storage and infrastructure management capability. Melio Data Center Suite allows storage volumes to be dynamically expanded and allows a shared LUN to be used for any workload or data type. RAID 1 (software mirroring) is available within the volume manager. The shared LUN can be made available as a CIFS or NFS share, simplifying the management of ISO files and other data.
Melio Data Center Suite allows snapshots to be taken from any server in the storage cluster. The snapshots can be mounted on any machine in the storage cluster, irrespective of which machine made the snapshot. The snapshots can be accessed by any VSS-based backup software. In addition detailed monitoring or storage performance is available, and Quality of Service can be set on a per VHD or a per process basis when there is a constraint in storage bandwidth available.
This suite includes licenses for the virtual servers, which provide shared read-write access to application data from the virtual servers, improving data availability, supporting scale-out of applications, and improving performance of many apps.
Melio Data Center Suite also provides remote configuration and assignment of logical storage volumes for Hyper-V hosts and for virtual machines.
Shared access to Application Data from Hyper-V Guests
In addition to providing a shared access from Hyper-V hosts to a SAN volume containing virtual machine files, Melio can also be installed on the guest servers to enable shared access to application data on a SAN volume. Each Melio Data Center Suite Hyper-V host license includes four licenses for Windows application servers running on virtual machines. Additional licenses are $495/virtual machine.
Virtual machines running on Hyper-V can use local storage that is contained within the .VHD file. The virtual machines can also directly mount an iSCSI volume, or utilize an iSCSI or Fibre Channel LUN passed through from the host server as a block device. 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 clustered file system can be installed on the virtual machines and used to provide shared access to iSCSI 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 on VHD files for Hyper-V 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. Sanbolic’s product suites 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 physical host and/or 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. (figure 1) Figure 1
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 servers and SAN storage. See FilerScaler
