Storage Management is Becoming the Make or Break Piece in a Successful Server Virtualization Strategy

Last week I blogged about the issues that were top of mind with users who were in attendance at the quarterly Omaha VMware Users Group (VMUG) meeting. Those challenges specifically included data protection, I/O bottlenecks and iSCSI SANs but notice that their issues can largely be traced back to an ineffective storage management strategy as the root of their issues. These problems are a BIG reason why we are seeing more announcements like today's enhanced and certified integration between the Citrix Essentials StorageLink™ technology and the 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers.

The importance of having an agile, well-managed virtualized infrastructure almost sounds cliché in today's world. However the truth of the matter is that without a plan to put one in place, you are almost certainly setting yourself up to fail in your emerging virtual environment.
 
Organizations have largely masked their current storage management problems. They do this with sophisticated Excel spreadsheets and teams of savvy engineers that spend long hours keeping their fingers in the storage management dikes, so to speak.  As companies move to virtual infrastructures these dikes start to spring some pretty big leaks.
 
Tens, hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines attached to virtual SANs that address virtual storage using virtual HBAs make it all but impossible for engineers to plug those holes with their fingers as they can no longer manually track this information with any degree of confidence. If anything, it is becoming very risky NOT to implement a storage management strategy that supports this burgeoning virtual infrastructure.
 
But to do so successfully requires higher levels of integration between virtual server environments and the networked storage to which these virtual servers attach so this virtual infrastructure can be automatically and centrally managed. Achieving this ideal is in large part what drove today's announced Citrix StorageLink certification of the 3PAR InServ Storage Servers.

This integration accomplishes several things for Citrix shops that are using 3PAR InServ Storage Servers:

• Automates and simplifies the use of advanced features on storage arrays. Creating snapshots and clones of virtual machines on storage arrays is becoming a priority for more users as they are needed to protect and recover existing virtual machines (VMs) as well as create new VMs. This new integration between Citrix and 3PAR enables Citrix administrators to centrally create and manage these snapshot and cloning features found on 3PAR systems using the Citrix Essentials virtualization management console.
• More quickly discover and map out their virtual infrastructure. To troubleshoot I/O performance problems on virtual environments means administrators need "At a glance" abilities to first determine how a VM is configured and what resources it is using. Citrix Essentials with its new integration with 3PAR gives administrators this ability. It can quickly discover virtual environments down to the storage level and then map what storage is assigned to individual VMs.
• Quickly implement new VMs or manage service levels of existing VMs. By centralizing management of key 3PAR features under the Citrix Essentials console, a single server or storage administrator can quickly create a new VM and automatically assign the appropriate tier of storage to the VM. Further, if performance starts to spike with an application on an existing VM, based on policies set by the same administrator, the 3PAR InServ Storage Server dynamically moves the data to a higher performing tier of storage.
• Increased VM density on physical servers. The additional insight, information and flexibility that Citrix Essentials provides into their virtual environment combined with the wide-striping and I/O performance of the 3PAR InServ means more VMs can be deployed on existing physical resources. This is possible because wide striping provides lower read latencies when virtual servers page to disk, a frequent performance bottleneck. 
  

By reducing latencies, a given physical server can handle more VMs.  In addition, by having the performance information at their fingertips that Citrix Essentials and 3PAR provides, administrators can be even more aggressive in how many VMs they deploy without exposing their organization to any new risks.

• Reduced capacity requirements for virtualized data centers. By purchasing and consuming storage only as data is written, the ballooning impact of storage purchases to support server virtualization can be cut in half.  In fact, 3PAR will provide a guarantee in writing to support a 50% capacity reduction when converting fully allocated legacy storage to 3PAR thin storage for XenServer deployments.

Effective storage management of virtualized environments is becoming the make or break piece of a successful enterprise storage management strategy. Companies can no longer expect their storage engineers to keep their fingers in the holes of the proverbial storage dike as the number of virtual servers in their environments makes it more than impractical to do this; it makes it impossible.

Tighter integration between virtual server management platforms such as Citrix Essentials and 3PAR InServ Storage Servers are no longer options for those organizations that expect to have an efficiently managed, optimally run virtual data center; they are requirements. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise only needs to talk to any of the 150+ users in attendance at the last Omaha VMUG meeting and they will give you an earful of just how critical it is to get the storage part of your virtual server implementation right.