Hi all,

It’s me again. Last week, I submitted a blog on the Citrix Community blogs site that I wanted you to know about. It describes the value-add Sanbolic Melio2010 brings to Citrix virtual solutions, i.e., enhancing their performance, scalability, manageability and availability. I also included references to several papers that you should find helpful, particularly if you are in the early planning and design phases of deploying Citrix solutions such as XenDesktop and/or XenApp that will be provisioned on-demand via Citrix Provisioning Services.

To visit the blog, click here: http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2010/08/12/Enhancing+Citrix+XenDesktop+and+XenApp+with+Sanbolic+Melio+2010

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Andy

 

Attention VARs!!!

Are you currently in the planning and/or design phases of building a highly scalable and highly available XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructure?

Are you planning to take advantage of the performance, scalability and reliability capabilities of SAN storage to store the virtual images (VHDs) that will be streamed to virtual machines hosting the desktops?

Are you spending a lot of time trying to find the best way to ensure that the infrastructure achieves the highest levels of performance, scalability, availability and manageability in order to realize the greatest return on your investment?

If so, please take a few minutes to read the following white paper: http://www.sanbolic.com/pdfs/HA_Options_for_Citrix_Virtual_Solutions.pdf.

This paper highlights the storage options most frequently considered by organizations looking to enable high availability for Provisioning Services™, or PVS™ (the underlying technology used to stream images on demand to virtual machines hosting virtual desktops).

Once you’ve finished reading the paper it will be obvious why, out of all the options available for enabling high availability for Provisioning Services, only Sanbolic Melio 2010 has proven to actually enhance Citrix XenDesktop!

Organizations that have deployed Citrix XenDesktop with Sanbolic Melio 2010 have achieved the following:

1. Simplified maintenance of vDisk images by consolidating all vDisks onto a single volume on SAN storage, with all vDisk changes available for streaming by multiple PVS Servers immediately, i.e., no need to replicate the vDisks to different PVS Servers to ensure vDisk consistency.

2. Enhanced I/O performance using stripe sets to leverage multiple storage controllers, caching and spindles, thereby improving the user experience.

3. Quick and seamless scale out by adding more PVS Servers or more storage resources on the fly, with little effort and no interruption in user productivity.

4. Enhanced utilization of storage resources to keep storage costs at a minimum.

5. Centralized management of storage resources as all physical disks are virtualized and managed from a single console that can be accessed locally or remotely.

6. Improved fault-tolerance via high availability of vDisks as well as the PVS database.

7. Protection for vDisks using VSS-based snapshots of shared volumes or individual vDisks, with the ability to mount snapshots on any PVS Server and browse through the snapshots quickly and easily via Explorer.exe.

If your interest in Sanbolic Melio 2010 is piqued by the information presented in the white paper and you’d like to see a live demonstration of how Melio 2010 enhances Citrix solutions, please contact us at sales@sanbolic.com and one of our sales representatives would be happy to schedule a demonstration for you.

For a more detailed look at how Sanbolic Melio 2010 optimizes Citrix XenDesktop, check out this paper: http://www.sanbolic.com/pdfs/Optimizing_Citrix_XenDesktop_VDI_Solutions_with_Sanbolic_Melio_2010.pdf, which explains how Melio 2010 enables the seamless scale-out of XenDesktop to allow organizations to extend the benefits of VDI to a larger percentage of their users.

To learn more about Sanbolic’s SAN-storage enhancing software, Melio 2010, please visit http://www.sanbolic.com. We’re confident you’ll see why Melio 2010 is the ideal choice for optimizing Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructures.

And while you’re there, check out the many other solutions we enhance, such as scalable file and web-serving farms, highly available SQL Server clusters and enterprise-class server virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V.

Sanbolic – Building better solutions with virtual shared storage!

Cheers,

Andy

By utilizing Sanbolic’s cluster file system Melio FS , LaScala Volume Manager, and AppCluster users can provide high availability and consolidation for SharePoint 2010. An update for AppCluster to be released in the next coming weeks will add a new feature that allows for grouping of databases (SharePoint requires that all the primary databases be located on the same server). This resource group can then be automatically failed-over to another SQL server in the event of a failure without the need for Microsoft Failover Clustering. For non-primary content databases AppCluster can provide this same capability as well as load balancing by distributing the different content database across different servers. AppCluster’s use of virtual IP’s allows this all to be done without requiring reconfiguration on the SharePoint server in the event of a fail-over. Additionally by using the Melio file system all SQL servers supporting SharePoint can utilize a single file system for database resources without the need for storage migration. Also Melio FS provides QoS components that allows users to allocate specific bandwidth guarantees to specific databases. These can be either the primary databases, additional content databases, or both. By using the LaScala volume manager users can expand their SharePoint database volumes on the fly without IO interruption and also mirror the data across multiple storage arrays allowing for a complete failure of a storage array while still providing access to the data. All of this comes in a single simple to install package and allows for quick deployment and simple administration.

You are a user of SQL and love it but as you’re scaling out your encounter performance issues and perhaps management cost increases.

You wish the solution had even more “enterprise like features” so you could consolidate and dynamically migrate databases.

Maybe you are wishing to run all of your 48 or more SQL servers in the same cluster, and expand the storage volume on-the-fly without downtime.

Did you know that you can do this with Melio?

Did you know that we also create an environment where you can load-balance, apply QoS for a specific database, and back up it up independently?

Stay with the environment you are familiar with, utilize you servers fully (as they are all active), get better utilization of your storage, and create much more flexibility in your SQL environment.
Scale out without limitations and without operation interruption, and avoid additional management cost!

Download your evaluation copy of Melio (which includes AppCluster) today to Upgrade your Enterprise SQL Environment

 

Howdy all,

It’s time for another exciting episode of… “What Sanbolic Melio 2010 can do for you!”

And it’s all right here in this white paper – http://www.sanbolic.com/pdfs/HA_Options_for_Citrix_Virtual_Solutions.pdf.

If you’re a distributor, reseller, systems integrator, or current or potential Citrix customer in the planning and design phases of deploying XenDesktop VDI and/or XenApp application delivery solutions, the information found in this paper couldn’t be more timely. This paper describes the storage options most frequently considered by organizations looking to achieve high availability for their virtual desktops and XenApp servers streamed from Provisioning Services. After reading through the paper, it should be fairly obvious that of all the options, only the Sanbolic Melio 2010 option offers organizations high availability for virtual desktops and XenApp servers as well as:

1. Simplified maintenance of vDisks by consolidating all vDisks onto a single volume on SAN storage.

2. Enhanced performance using stripe sets (leveraging multiple storage controllers, caching and addition spindles) to improve the user experience.

3. Quick and seamless scale out for XenDesktop and/or XenApp infrastructures, with little effort and no interruption in user productivity.

4. Enhanced utilization of storage resources, allowing organizations to save money on disk drives.

5. Protection for vDisks using VSS-based snapshots of shared volumes or individual vDisks.

If your interest in Sanbolic Melio 2010 is piqued by the information presented in the white paper and you’d like to see a live demonstration of how Melio 2010 enhances these solutions, please contact us at sales@sanbolic.com and one of our sales representatives would be happy to schedule a demonstration for you.

Cheers,

Andy

  When deploying a Microsoft SQL Server environment and looking for high availability capabilities, users often rely on Windows Failover Clustering to provide failover capabilities for the SQL instances and their databases. However deploying failover clustering for SQL presents a number of limitations: First the disks that SQL will use to store its data must be basic; dynamic disks are not allowed in failover clustering. This means that users will not be able to deploy host based stripping, mirroring or volume expansion for volumes on these disks. Second, Disks become active/passive clustered disk resources allowing only one server to access a disk at a time for SQL data. This means that for each active SQL instance in the cluster a separate LUN must be provisioned and managed. The third limitation is that failover clustering for SQL operates at the instance level. This means that there is no way to load balance the databases under the instance by distributing the load across multiple servers.

Sanbolic helps solve these limitations by leveraging our shared file system Melio FS and a new component in our product suite called AppCluster. Melio FS is an advanced clustered file system  that enables high performance concurrent read/write access to data on SAN storage from multiple physical or virtual SQL servers giving users the ability to consolidate all their SQL data to single data store that can be easily managed. AppCluster gives users the ability to cluster the SQL instances utilizing this shared volume in an active/active mode and provides: ease of management, high availability, very fast failover, and load balancing of multiple physical or virtual SQL servers accessing a single SAN LUN containing multiple databases, while removing the complexity and the need for expensive underutilized hardware associated with typical clustering tools.
Key Advantages of AppCluster:

• Support for large cluster sizes
• Can support 100’s of nodes in the same cluster limited only by hardware
• Faster failover times for minimum down time
• Database consolidation and migration capability
• Failover environment can be set up in minutes
• Supports configuration of database grouping and dependency
• Virtual and physical machines can be mixed in the same cluster
• Native support for SQL Management Studio
• Ability to scale number of nodes and storage dynamically while active I/O is present

Also AppCluster utilizes Sanbolic’s volume manager LaScala for disk and volume administration, allowing users to deploy host based striping, mirroring, and volume expansion for their SQL volumes without requiring dynamic disks.

 

The problem with DAS:

In the case of DAS the attachment of storage to server complexity is not there on a server by server basis, but in todays virtualized environment the server by server direct attached story is completely irrelevant. Realistically when using DAS you would be stuck with an individual piece of hardware, which would need to be powered, managed, and backed up individually – and there is no scale up or scale out option. In addition there is no migration story and when your server goes down so does your storage. In the past that management strategy was referred to as “sneakernet”

Now when you add replication that would need to be deployed to make sure you don’t have a single point of failure and you start realizing the cost and overhead associated with it, that SAN all of a sudden seems like a wonderful option to reduce your day to day pain.

The best option:

If we take a SAN based storage array and with the help of our Melio product suite you would get the full benefit of shared storage infrastructure. You would be able to aggregate the maximum amount of spindles (hard drives) thus realizing the optimum performance out of your storage box, centralize your storage infrastructure, centralize your back up, centralize your management, reduce and almost eliminate the proprietary management aspects and instead use native OS security attributes, and improve utilization by up to 70%. That is the SAN story the way it was meant to be and that would be hard if not even impossible to match with DAS storage.

Now what if there is a technology that would allow you to get similar benefits as a SAN from your existing DAS?

I have spent the past 15 years of my career heavily involved in storage both as an end-user and as co-founder of a storage focused company, and I cannot help but get amused when I hear the bold statement “SAN is dead”. I can’t help but go back in time and see a tight correlation with another bold statement “tape is dead”. Let’s see the most widely used and heavily relayed on back up option is …… Tape, and no it is not going away because it has its purpose and longevity and it just gets the job done. Sure there are a number of other backup technologies and they all coexist with tape, but they are yet to get even close to killing it.

So now that we have a basic example of how a well established technology is hard to kill, let me focus on the use cases and advantages of SAN vs. DAS. Both approaches have their best use cases and applications.

The problem with SAN:
One of the reasons that we have seen a strong opposition to SAN is the unnecessary complexity that has long been associated with the management and configuration of shared storage infrastructure (or what especially FC SAN haters otherwise refer to as OPEX). To give credit to most of the FC manufacturers, they have made incredible progress on that front and things are much easier today then ever before. But lets also not forget that we have iSCSI, infiniband and SATA storage protocols, all of which provide the use of shared storage.

The reason that there is so much complexity is that instead of one option to plug the storage into a server, with any of the above protocols we have the option to plug many servers into the same storage, yet the OS and the file systems don’t recognize this approach…And now users need to start slicing and dicing the storage so that they can assign specific pieces of storage to specific servers, which in a way defeats the purpose of shared storage and leaves SAN only with the advantage of storage consolidation.

Tomorrow we will look at The Problem with DAS and the best options available.

Having grown up in Northern Europe, Easter was always my favorite holidays. Easter symbolizes spring for me, and everything that comes with it! The smell of the earth thawing, the first flowers, and the light! After many months of darkness the days get significantly longer every day for the next three months, until it’s completely light around the clock.

Spring also makes me want to get organized and throw out old stuff! Good old fashion spring cleaning if you will. The new energy that spring brings us makes us look at what we have and think about how we can improve the place we are in or how we do things, by cleaning and straighten out, and creating flow and space to grow.

So if your feelings are like mine and they reflect in your work, you might be thinking about how to improve the management of the infrastructure you are in charge of. During last year you created cost savings by virtualizing a lot of your servers and desktops, now you are thinking about the mess this has created at the storage level and the increased management tasks it has brought on. A radical way of spring cleaning would be to throw the old out, but what do you replace it with? After reviewing budgets you might also realized that keeping what you have but trying to make better use of it might make sense. How about improving the utilization of hardware? Both for servers and storage. How about improving server utilization with up to 95%? You can do this if you let your servers run in active-active mode (as opposed to active-passive). How about utilizing the storage fully because of the way data is written to it and not having to have the data replicated multiple times?

Take a look at cost savings and efficiency created through better utilizing the hardware you have, rearranging and creating a smarter solution with Melio. Spring cleaning will happen this year, in ways you could only imagine before.

Happy Spring!

Hello,

My name is Andy Melmed and as the Director of Enterprise Solutions for Sanbolic, Inc., and a member of the technical team responsible for devising, testing and implementing highly scalable and highly available shared storage solutions, I am going to use this blog as a venue to share information to help organizations realize the benefits of shared storage (i.e., data consolidation, simplified storage management, improved storage resource utilization, enhanced storage scalability and scale out, etc.) and achieve greater returns on their investments in SAN storage.

In my first installment, I am going to offer an introduction to our SAN software – Melio 2010, and what it is designed to do.

Melio 2010 is a product suite comprised of several software components. At the core of Melio 2010 is Melio FS, an all-purpose cluster file system that allows multiple Windows Servers to share concurrent read and write access to data stored on a partition or LUN on SAN storage. With multiple servers sharing access to one LUN, organizations can consolidate data and ensure high availability of data, while providing centralized data management and data protection.

To simplify the management of shared volumes formatted with Melio FS, Melio 2010 includes a cluster volume manager that virtualizes physical storage to allow organizations to make more efficient use of their storage resources. Administrators can manage Melio shared volumes locally or remotely and can create volumes comprised of multiple disks from multiple heterogeneous storage arrays. Access to volumes can be secured using native Windows™ security tools such as ACLs and Active Directory™.

Melio 2010 includes various other tools and applications as well, including a data mover utility that allows files to be copied or moved automatically from one volume to another based on pre-defined user-based policies and supports VSS-based snapshots of Melio volumes for data backup and recovery purposes; a file sharing management application that allows an administrator to manage all Windows File Shares hosted by multiple servers throughout an entire enterprise environment from a centralized management console; and application clustering software that virtualizes resources (i.e., SQL Server instances and databases) to allow rapid migration and load-balancing of resources across physical or virtual machines.

All components of Melio 2010 are designed to work together to allow organizations to fully realize all the benefits associated with a true, all-purpose, advanced cluster file system. And what’s more, Melio 2010 installs quickly and easily so users can create highly scalable, highly available shared storage within minutes, ensuring a fast return on their investment.

That completes my first blog entry. Going forward, if you have questions about any of the information presented in my articles, please let me know. I would be happy to help in any way I can.

Sincerely,

Andy