Small Business Storage Virtualization Guide

Regardless of the virtualization engine in use, storage decisions are very important for the SMB, and shared storage is the one of the most critical design elements of virtualization environments. This Datamation article explains the storage virtualization challenges of the SMB and provides guidance on how to go the extra distance to reach virtualization nirvana.

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"For the SMB, what options are available for shared storage that can be used to virtualize servers? In short, there are plenty storage choices available.

"Many organizations may first be tempted to use direct attached storage (DAS) for virtualization. DAS is fine for a proof of concept for virtualizing servers, but we have to step back and evaluate the objective of server virtualization and how using DAS impacts this task.

"One of the core goals of virtualization is to abstract operating systems (or servers) from hardware. If a vSphere, Hyper-V or XenServer host is providing virtual machines on a single DAS array, we have only partially abstracted the operating system from the hardware. Shared storage via some form of storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) device can entirely abstract the operating system from the underlying hardware.

"If DAS is used, there is a well-defined single point of failure if the server fails. To be fair, DAS arrays are usually very powerful in terms of I/O controller and number of drives. Even for the smallest virtualized infrastructure, if we can introduce the concept of a cluster of hosts with shared storage, we have truly abstracted the operating system from the server."

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