Discover what Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems and VMware vSphere 4.0 can do to ease Windows server consolidation efforts in a June 2009 white paper that specifically addresses how to fulfill storage requirements typical in virtualization initiatives. The writers cover "storage in server virtualization" to refer to storage used to support applications and operating systems that are virtualized and encapsulated in a virtual machine (the virtualized application stack) and related data (VMDK disks).

The authors center on the simplicity of using the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems, namely:

• Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System
• Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System
• Sun Storage 7310 Unified Storage System
• Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System

and Sun x64 servers:

• Sun Fire X4170 Server
• Sun Fire X4270 Server
• Sun Fire X4450 Server
• Sun Fire X4440 Server
• Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server
• Sun Blade 6000
• Sun X6240
• Sun X6270 Processor Blades

in conjunction with the vSphere 4.0 software (and earlier VMware software versions). With VMware vSphere 4.0, a virtual machine can now scale to support up to 64 cores and 512GB of physical memory. This allows the number of virtualized servers to scale more easily in support of more demanding workloads.

To ramp storage performance and reduce I/O latency, certain Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System models can be configured with enterprise-quality solid state devices (SSDs) to cache read and write operations. For example, the Sun Storage 7410 system can support up to 600 GB of read cache and 288 GB of write cache, which can help to cache virtual machine execution and accelerate read and write performance for I/O-intensive applications.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Simplifying storage in VMware deployments

• Sample reference architectures for VMware deployments
• “Storage virtualization” versus “storage in server virtualization
• Virtualization solutions from Sun Microsystems and VMware

Reference architectures

• Entry-level sandbox
• Small configuration -- test and development
• Medium configuration -- pre-production, staging
• Large configuration -- production
• Configuring high-availability storage

Advantages of file-based storage using NFS

• Administrative simplicity
• Thin provisioning
• Flexible ZFS-based NAS offering
• Hybrid Storage Pool technology
• Real-time visibility with DTrace Analytics

Data services

Core solution components

• Custom configurations

A single point of contact for VMware solutions: software, storage, servers and support

More Information

Sun and VMware Solutions Guide for Windows Server Consolidation - June 2009 White Paper (Login or registration required)

Sun Storage and VMware

VMware and Sun Partnership

Sun server and storage platforms certified for VMware infrastructure solutions

Sun solution for Windows consolidation

Product information on the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter