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Shared access to application data on VMware ESX Guest Servers
Melio clustered file system can be installed on the VMware ESX guest servers to enable shared access to application data on a SAN volume.
Virtual machines running on VMware ESX can use local storage that is contained within the .VMDK 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 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 VMDK files for ESX 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.
A file system and volume manager that can be used as a shared resource by multiple physical host and/or virtual guest servers enables 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. |
