VTrak S3000 Integrated Storage Solutions for Virtualized Infrastructures

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1 Solution Whitepaper VTrak S3000 Integrated Storage Solutions for Virtualized Infrastructures Executive Summary The paradigm shift from traditional IT environment to virtualized infrastructure is happening now with the wide adoption of virtualization technologies. This transformation in the IT architecture that started with large enterprises is now a priority for small and medium enterprises, educational institutions and public sectors. A recent survey of IT professionals representing midmarket (less than 1000 employees), conducted by a leading analyst firm, highlighted that virtualization investment is the top priority for SMB segment in the years The OpEx and CapEx are primary motivating factors for the key decision makers to consider while making IT spending decisions. Various research studies show % overall reduction in operating costs on moving to virtualized infrastructure. Virtualization creates a shared infrastructure and aid in resource consolidation both at the server and storage level. In addition to hardware savings from consolidation, virtualization optimizes infrastructure costs and increases operational efficiency. To maximize ROI, increasing server utilization levels up to 90% is common. Such high levels of server utilization however causes huge impact on the shared storage in terms of I/O performance, utilization, availability and data protection services like backup, restore and disaster recovery. Storage Virtualization is a critical piece in IT strategy towards achieving virtualized infrastructure. This is emphasized in various market research reports from Gartner and IDC. PROMISE VTrak S3000 is an enterprise-class SAN appliance that provides powerful storage provisioning and advanced data protection services at an affordable price. VTrak S3000 features Fibre Channel and iscsi host connectivity plus advanced data services including snapshot, thin provisioning, and replication, making it perfect for virtualized infrastructure and disaster recovery. This Solution White Paper illustrates how PROMISE VTrak S3000 Storage Solution integrates with the various Server Virtualization technologies from industry leading vendors and aids in transformation of IT infrastructure. KEY HIGHLIGHTS Easy-to-manage FC 8G and iscsi 1G/10G SAN Appliance Modular and Scalable both in Capacity and in Performance All-Inclusive Storage Virtualization and Data Protection Services High availability with seamless fail-over and fail-back capability Application specific and Hypervisor aware Point-in-Time Snapshot and Recovery Agents Certified for VMware, Citrix XenServer and Hyper-V Disaster Recovery through DeltaScan TM enabled block level WAN-optimized Replication Affordable and Flexible to Fit in Your Budget

2 Current IT Challenges The demanding and increasingly complex IT environments have been hungry for greater workloads and at the same time facing shrinking IT budget in terms of capital equipment, power and cooling costs and highly expensive floor space in the data center. Adding to this challenge, IT managers are often tasked to look for creative solutions that not only meet the stringent regulatory compliance but also have the flexibility to adapt to the organizational changes. The burgeoning costs of software applications and associated licensing are adding pressure to the already tight budgets. It is not uncommon for the software vendors to demand specialized server hardware to get the optimal performance, introducing sever sprawl and causing manageability issues. IT managers face constant dilemma between adopting newer technologies and improving the operational efficiencies of the legacy infrastructures given reduced IT budget. Planned and Unplanned Downtime are inherent to data centers. That said, cost-effective, fast and easy recovery must be planned to achieve reliable and highly available IT services. Virtualized Infrastructure Virtualized infrastructure addresses the very problem and challenges discussed above. As an added benefit, it mitigates the risk and vulnerability of the current datacenters. The concept of virtualized infrastructure which evolved over the last few years has now taken center stage with abstraction being provided in every operational area. Server and Storage Virtualization are the most important pieces of this puzzle. Server virtualization enables one physical server to support multiple workloads simultaneously by decoupling workloads consisting of an operating system, application, from the physical computing platform and running them in separate virtual machines (VMs). This enhances the flexibility, agility, scalability and manageability of the servers. Depending on the application needs and the design architecture of IT environment involving older and newer servers, legacy and greenfield applications, a combinations of homogeneous (similar OSs like Windows family for example) and heterogeneous workloads are used on the virtualized servers. Shared or networked storage virtualization enables higher accessibility, dynamic provisioning, higher storage utilization rates in addition to improved application performance, reliability, scalability and flexibility. When designing an IT infrastructure, architects must keep in mind resiliency and on-demand scale-up and scaledown architectures in terms of computing and storage capacity. Doing so empowers IT departments to align their services with technology innovation and business climate changes. PROMISE understands the needs of the market and is proud to offer VTrak S3000 Storage Virtualization Solution to address the storage challenges of virtualized infrastructure.

3 VTrak S3000 Virtual Storage Platform PROMISE VTrak S3000 is an enterprise class SAN appliance that provides powerful storage provisioning and advanced data protection services at an affordable price. Featuring Fibre Channel and iscsi host connectivity, VTrak S3000 uses a single unit of rack space to simplify storage management across local and regional boundaries. Storage is added to the VTrak S3000 using best in class, high performance VTrak x10 Series and VTrak x30 Series RAID subsystems. Flexible host connectivity options include 8G FC, 1G iscsi and 10G iscsi - the most prevalent interconnect between storage and physical servers as well as virtual servers. Exchange MS Windows SQL MS Windows LAMP Linux SMB/CIFS Windows Exchange MS Windows Oracle MS Windows MySQL Linux WebServer Linux FC/iSCSI Interconnect Backup Server DR Site Primary Site VTrak S3000 Solution WAN VTrak S3000 Solution Figure 1. PROMISE VTrak S3000 Solution for Virtualized Infrastructure Data protection, reliability, availability and flexibility form the cornerstones of the virtual datacenters designed to meet increasing demand for resiliency. Advanced data protection and powerful storage provisioning primarily designed to address the storage requirement for server virtualization are included in the sophisticated yet easyto-use VTrak S3000 virtual storage platform. Capacity on-demand using Thin Provisioning Storage allocated per VM can really add up with growing number of VMs to meet the application demand. With head room for each VM for future growth leads to multitude of unused capacity that is wasted leading to poor storage utilization. Thin Provisioning provides automatic way of adding storage only as the demand for storage grows. It helps achieve storage optimization in automated policy driven manner.

4 Performance The IOPS and Bandwidth requirement are notably higher from huge OS workloads on virtualized servers compared to physical servers. VTrak S3000 supports optimized storage configuration to meet the high IOPS in the cases of random small block I/O patterns seen most commonly in these virtual infrastructures. I/O consolidation Virtualized servers with many VMs concurrently running and accessing SAN storage create a high bandwidth requirement. It is well addressed with flexible and multi-protocol host interfaces - 8G FC and 10G iscsi. NIC teaming of 1G iscsi ports provide aggregate bandwidth as well. Tiered storage VTrak S3000 supports Storage Pools of similar type of drives with automated policies further simplifying dynamic storage allocation. Diverse business critical applications running on VMs in virtual infrastructure need access to reliable storage with varied performance levels. VTrak x30 and VTrak x10 series provide SATA, Near-Line SAS, SAS and SSD drive support. High Availability Server consolidation increases the risk of failures, data loss and storage unavailability and inaccessibility as multiple applications would be rendered un-usable. Single points of failure will only increase the magnitude of business impact in virtual infrastructure spanning multiple sites. VTrak S3000 nodes when configured in a High Availability (HA) mode eliminate single points of failure. Automatic Failover during outages and simplified steps for Failback achieve improved business continuance. Redundancy and Load Balancing Redundancy with active-active and active-passive support is provided at the appliance level by VTrak S3000 and at the controller level by VTrak Ex10 and VTrak Ex30 RAID subsystem. Multipathing support to the virtualized server infrastructure enables users to achieve path failover as well as load balancing. Migration Smooth Physical to Virtual (P2V) migration solution helps in moving servers and associated applications in the current IT environment to VMs. During hardware maintenance windows, it is be easier for IT administrators to migrate temporarily servers to VMs, thereby keeping the business-critical applications running. Once the primary servers are restored, Virtual to Physical (V2P) migration restores the production environment. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Designing virtual infrastructure with focus on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery is gaining momentum owing to regulatory compliance requirements and business needs to meet 24 x 7 global demands. VTrak S3000 has well proven snapshot enabled replication and DeltaScan TM WAN optimization with block level deduplication. These great features provide flexible options to achieve optimal Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) metrics and enable reliable recovery of VMs and the virtual infrastructure in the event of a disaster. Data protection Snapshots provide an efficient way of creating recovery points in time and achieve 100 % transactional integrity and point-in-time consistency for the application data. Server Consolidation only increases the load on the

5 backup and recovery process with multiple application servers hosted on a single machine. VTrak S3000 Application-Aware Snapshot agents are optimized for VM-level backup and are integrated with the hypervisors to reduce the duration in which VMs stay in backup mode. Recovery Agents provides instant recovery in a server virtualized environment in the event of hardware or software failures or even site-disasters. Synchronous and asynchronous mirroring options provide protection at the storage subsystem level. With PerfectFlash TM and PerfectRAID TM, data protection and data availability features are provided even at the drive level. PerfectFlash TM Non-disruptive update VTrak Ex30 series has PerfectFlash TM, a non-disruptive firmware update capability built into the RAID subsystem. This allows IT administrators to perform planned maintenance upgrades on the storage while virtualized servers with VMs continue to serve the business needs. PerfectRAID TM PerfectRAID TM is PROMISE patented RAID data protection technology with a suite of data protection and redundancy features built into every VTrak Ex10 and VTrak Ex30 RAID series. Predictive Data Migration (PDM), an important feature of PerfectRAID TM, monitors the health status of the hard drives inside the subsystem. If a drive becomes unhealthy, PDM copies data from the unhealthy drive to spare drive, preventing data loss. The array remains in normal status during the data transition between the drives. For more details, please refer to the PDM Whitepaper at the PROMISE knowledgebase - Hypercache HyperCache using high speed devices such as SSD, provide IO acceleration for hosts in server virtualized environments. The I/O patterns typical of these environments are random workloads with small blocks. Hypercache with read and write caching significantly increases the performance. PROMISE VTrak S3000 is designed to provide an efficient and integrated server virtualization solution proven to work reliably with industry leading vendors, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. VTrak S3000 Solution for VMware Infrastructure VMware is one of the leading providers of virtualized infrastructure. The virtualization of physical resources using VMware ESX/ESXi Server facilitates the consolidation of servers and also provides cost-effective DR solution. VMware vsphere is a virtualization platform providing enterprise-class high availability, performance and reliability. PROMISE VTrak S3000 is VMware ESX 4.x certified as an iscsi and FC SAN Appliance. ESX/ESXi provides host-level storage virtualization thereby logically abstracting the storage layer from virtual machines (VM). Each virtual disk that a VM can access through one of virtual SCSI controller resides in the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastore or Raw Device Mapping (RDM) presented by VTrak S3000 as a logical volume also referred to as a SAN resource.

6 Reliability features such as VMware HA and VMware Fault Tolerance provide continuous application protection and high assurance of availability. VTrak S3000 provides reliable storage access with multipath support and is proven to work under ESX/ESXi clustered environment. VTrak S3000 is proven to work with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) which continuously balances the VM workloads across the resource pool. As the VMs reside on the shared storage presented by VTrak S3000, using VMware VMotion, VMware DRS transparently migrates the VMs between hosts in the resource pool and effectively meets the SLAs for the application servers. VTrak S3000 Snapshot Director for VMware VMware snapshot process has advantages over the traditional backup agents. That said, still there are limitations with this implementation in terms of performance and backup window. As snapshots of VMs are taken, the VMs continue to run on the VMware ESX/ESXi server. However, data is no longer written to the primary storage device. Instead, in order to make sure the snapshot image remains static, ESX/ESXi Server creates a separate delta disk or redo log to capture any new data written during the backup process. Once the backup is complete, the changes captured in the redo log must be written back to the primary storage device, a process that can significantly impact performance of the production environment. If the flushing of the snapshot data takes extended period, second or even third layer of redo logs maybe required. With the flushing not completed before the next scheduled backup, the data is highly vulnerable and will severely impact service level agreements (SLAs). In addition to all these, VMware backups require a heavy utilization of resources and can significantly impact the production operations. VTrak S3000 Snapshot Director for VMware addresses all the above issues. Snapshot Director Virtual Appliance (SDVA) is part of the all-inclusive data protection services. Application-aware Snapshot Agents are installed in the VMs while SDVA is installed directly on the VMware ESX/ESXi Server. SDVA coordinates the snapshot process between the virtualized application and the ESX/ESXi server, putting both elements into a transactional complete state before a snapshot image is captured. With 100% transactional integrity and immediately usable snapshots that are point-in-time consistent, server administrators can instantly recover data with minimal risk of data loss or data corruption. SDVA ensures the transactional integrity of the data and eliminates the need for consistency checks and repairs. SDVA also reduces the impact on production operations because the VMware snapshot is used for only a few seconds and not for the duration of the backup process. SDVA provides an additional benefit by consolidating snapshot management. In a PROMISE VTrak S3000 Virtualized Storage environment with VMware infrastructure, information is automatically gathered from the VMware vcenter Server. This enables the vcenter server to understand where the files belonging to a given VMware ESX/ESXi Server reside. When a snapshot is initiated for a given virtualized storage volume, all the appropriate VMware ESX/ESXi Servers are put into backup mode. This is especially helpful in environments with multiple virtual machines, where snapshot management can become confusing and difficult to coordinate. VTrak S3000 solution that includes Application-Aware Snapshot Agents and Hypervisor-aware Snapshot Director helps organizations running VMware virtualized infrastructure achieve optimal recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

7 VTrak S3000 DR Automation for VMware Infrastructure In the event of disaster resulting in a site failure, the biggest task of the DR solution is to restore the applications back online as quickly as possible. Restoring business operations from a remote site can be a tedious, manual process and often a lengthy one adversely impacting the RTO metrics of the organization. VMware vcenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) accelerates and simplifies this process by automating site failover. PROMISE VTrak S3000 Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) is integrated with vcenter SRM to provide a WAN-optimized replication solution enabling organizations to achieve seamless recovery. As explained earlier, VTrak S3000 Snapshot Director coordinates the snapshot functions at the ESX/ESXi Server level to create snapshot images used for replication. Another big advantage of the vcenter SRM is that it enables testing of DR plans, a critical and an expensive operation. VMware vcenter SRM coordinates with PROMISE VTrak S3000 SRA to allow automated, nondisruptive testing of systems at the recovery site. Temporary snapshot disk images are used to boot virtual machines, allowing vcenter SRM to validate that the applications start successfully. Once the testing completes, the snapshots are deleted. During recovery, VMware vcenter SRM automatically correlates these transactional intact data images with the associated virtual machines. Then vcenter SRM starts the VMs and brings the business processes back online in minutes. Figure 2. PROMISE VTrak S3000 DR Solution for VMware Infrastructure

8 As illustrated in Figure 2, PROMISE VTrak S3000 DR Solution for VMware infrastructure comprises of PROMISE SRA at both Primary and Recovery sites, installed on the VMware vcenter Server along with VMware vcenter SRM. VTrak S3000 Snapshot Director (SDVA) installable as Virtual Appliance should reside in every VMware ESX/ESXi host and coordinates the communication between VTrak S3000 appliance and Application- aware Snapshot Agents installed in each VM. Using the DeltaScan TM enabled WAN-optimized replication, both the primary and recovery site are synchronized. With the DR plans that can be created and tested well in advance, PROMISE and VMware integrated solution empowers IT managers to rest assured that the business-critical applications running in virtualized infrastructure are protected. PROMISE VTrak S3000 WAN optimized replication solution builds resiliency into a multi-site DR planning. VTrak S3000 for Microsoft Hyper-V Solution In most IT infrastructures, Microsoft is a dominant player providing business productivity applications such as Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint with production servers hosting Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2008 Server editions. Microsoft plays an important role in the server virtualization with its Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. Hyper-V is hypervisor based virtualization technology built into all Windows Server 2008 x64 Editions and made available as a Role. Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) is enterpriseclass management software for managing high-availability cluster of Windows Servers. PROMISE VTrak S3000 is Microsoft Windows 2008 R2/ Hyper-V certified as iscsi and FC SAN Appliance. VTrak S3000 provides storage virtualization services and tightly integrates with data protection features offered by Microsoft virtualization solution and thereby addressing the storage challenges that arise from a virtualized server in a Microsoft Hyper-V environment. A Virtual disk that a VM can access through a virtual SCSI controller can be Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) that functions simply as a set of blocks, stored as a regular file using the host OS file system such as NTFS or passthrough disk bypassing the Hyper-V host file system. Both the options are supported in VTrak S3000, which presents storage as a logical volume also referred to as a SAN resource. Additionally VTrak S3000 PerfectPATH TM, a robust and reliable multipath driver for FC SAN topologies, installed on the Hyper-V server provides path failover capabilities. Native Multi-Path Input and Output (MPIO) support for iscsi SAN topologies provide the same reliability. Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) enables integral backups that are point-in-time and applicationlevel consistent without the backup tool having knowledge about the internals of each application. In a Hyper-V environment, a backup of the entire environment including VMs, can be created in a single operation, and the backups produced for the different VSS compatible guests in the system are transactional consistent at the guest application level and point in time consistent among the different VMs, without the need for the guests to have backup agents installed. VTrak S3000 Snapshot Agent for VSS is well integrated and proven tool that uses robust host-based backup of VMs utilizing Windows VSS-based infrastructure. The Snapshot Agent for VSS has its own requestor (component that starts VSS backup or restore) and hardware provider (component that creates the snapshot volumes by communicating with hardware).

9 With no additional components required, Microsoft applications such as Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint can be quiesced before taking a snapshot and thereby guaranteeing 100% transactional integrity and point-intime consistency. In order for a VM to take part in the VSS process, it must have Hyper-V integration tool installed, otherwise the VM is temporarily suspended and saved to the disk during snapshot creation. When a Snapshot View devices are assigned to the host during a full backup, the Hyper-V writer will rollback each VM to the same consistent point-in-time. SCVMM supports Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) with multiple VMs residing on same CSV LUN which is nothing more than a virtualized logical resource presented by S3000 to the cluster of nodes. The primary benefit of this proven configuration is that a single VM can be migrated independently of others residing on the same CSV LUN. As the datacenters are evolving towards fully virtualized infrastructure, it is very common to see a mix of physical and virtualized servers. SCVMM provides a common framework to manage both physical and virtual servers. VTrak S3000 appliance based replication solution along with SCVMM and Windows Server Failover Clustering, provide an end-to-end, reliable, cost-effective DR solution with huge performance advantage over the software-based replication. VTrak S3000 for Citrix XenServer Solution Citrix is a leading vendor of virtualized infrastructure and also the first solution provider of a hypervisor based on paravirtualization technologies. Citrix XenServer is a free virtualization platform based on open-source Xen hypervisor. Citrix XenServer together with Citrix XenCenter, a multi-server management console, has powered a few of the largest virtualization deployments. VTrak S3000 is Citrix Ready certified as FC and iscsi SAN Appliance. VTrak S3000 is tightly integrated with XenServer complementing each other strengths in offering excellent integrated virtualization solution for transforming the datacenters. Citrix XenServer defines container called Storage Repositories (SR) as particular storage target, in which Virtual Disk Images (VDIs) are stored. VDI is disk abstraction that contains the contents of a virtual disk. VTrak S3000 utilizes these abstractions to provide advanced storage virtualization services such as Thin Provisioning and data protection through mirroring, snapshots and WAN-optimized replication. Passthrough technology allows individual VMs or the guest domains to access the virtualized storage presented by S3000 directly thereby improving response time. NIC bonding available in XenServer coupled with bonding of iscsi interfaces on VTrak S3000 upstream, protects against path failures in addition to adding higher bandwidth based on the configuration settings on the two ends. Advanced features like Citrix XenMotion and High-Availability can be reliably configured with a XenServer pool added as SAN Clients to VTrak S3000 in a clustered configuration.

10 Conclusion PROMISE is well positioned to address the ever growing IT challenges in achieving virtualized infrastructure. As illustrated in this Solution Whitepaper, VTrak S3000 is designed to provide cost-effective, efficient and integrated storage and server virtualization solutions and proven to reliably work with industry leading vendors - VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. To learn more, visit PROMISE Technology, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PROMISE, the PROMISE logo, S3000, HyperCache, HyperCache-R, HyperCache-W, SnapshotView, and DeltaScan are registered or pending trademarks of PROMISE Technology, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. VMware is a registered trademark and ESX Server, vcenter, VMotion, DRS and vsphere are trademarks of VMware, Inc. Windows and Hyper-V are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Citrix XenServer, XenMotion and XenCenter are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Information regarding products, services and offerings may be superseded by subsequent documents and are subject to change without notice. For the latest information and specifications regarding PROMISE Technology, Inc., and any of its offerings or services, please contact your local PROMISE office or the corporate headquarters. v1.01 5/6/2011