Managing storage in the virtual data center. A white paper on HP Storage Essentials support for VMware host virtualization

Transcription

1 Managing storage in the virtual data center A white paper on HP Storage Essentials support for VMware host virtualization

2 Introduction As server virtualization technologies like VMware get deployed in data centers, the increased complexity of the IT service makes storage management very challenging. HP Storage Essentials is a storage resources management solution that provides comprehensive capabilities to manage heterogeneous storage and its resources in a virtualized environment. By providing VMware to storage array visibility and capacity management, best-in-class analytics, and automation capabilities, HP Storage Essentials improves storage utilization and reduces operational expenses in the data center. The virtual data center is here. In today s competitive global economy, businesses need to be poised to respond faster to market changes, new customer demands, and growth opportunities. To do this, enterprises need an agile IT infrastructure that is built to deliver better business outcomes. At the same time, enterprises have to hold the line on rising data center costs. To address these challenges, enterprises have adopted virtualization technologies that allow IT to consolidate infrastructures pool and share resources to improve utilization and reduce data center costs. Virtualization also increases flexibility because a diverse range of resources can now be added, changed, and moved easily to meet shifts in business demand. With the reduced cost and increased agility value proposition, it s no wonder that just about every enterprise IT organization is adopting virtualization technologies today. Most analysts claim that server virtualization technologies like VMware have been deployed in over 75 percent of enterprises already and their penetration will grow dramatically in the next few years. Virtualization clouds server-storage visibility. While server virtualization technologies like VMware s ESX and virtual server bring several benefits to the enterprise, they also create dynamics in the storage environment. To begin with, virtualization has dramatically increased network-based storage within the enterprise. In fact, several storage analysts predict that 50 percent of new storage purchases are driven by server virtualization initiatives. A key reason for this increase is that vendors like VMware and Microsoft recommend that all hypervisors use storage area network (SAN)-based storage to take advantage of dynamic application scaling technologies like VMware VMotion. The increased deployment of SAN storage introduces management challenges; it also increases the complexity of the server/storage relationships. Gone is the well understood server/san/storage array interrelationship; now we have additional virtual machine abstractions like virtual machine files system (VMFS), virtual machine disks (VMDK), virtual host bus adapters (HBAs) to add to the complexity of the server/storage dependency. This complexity makes it hard for the server and storage team to control and make changes to its infrastructure. Additionally, the lack of server/storage dependencies also makes it hard to ensure application and storage performance. 2

3 The virtualization environment also helps optimize storage. How many resources are allocated to a hypervisor and virtual machine (VM)? How much of it is used? What is underutilized and what can be reclaimed? Do I have virtual machine (VM) sprawl (undermanaged virtual servers) in my environment? Are these servers consuming expensive storage resources? Without good answers to these questions, enterprises will not use their storage resources effectively and will consequently see dramatic increases in storage budgets and purchase needs. Lastly, the enhanced agility of virtualization also demands faster storage automation. Customers can no longer accept long latencies in the storage provisioning process. They expect storage provisioning to be done fast and in a repeatable way; the visionary customers are, in fact, expecting coordinated server and storage provisioning solutions. HP Storage Essentials makes storage configurations and resources visible again. The HP Storage Essentials Enterprise Edition SRM software suite is an award-winning tool that simplifies heterogeneous management of storage infrastructures. HP Storage Essentials Enterprise Edition SRM provides several capabilities to manage storage operations including storage discovery and configuration management, capacity management, customized reporting, provisioning, business application and backup monitoring, and end-to-end performance management. The integrated portfolio of storage resource management (SRM) solutions increases staff efficiency, optimizes storage, automates and simplifies storage tasks. HP Storage Essentials provides comprehensive storage management in VMware deployments. HP Storage Essentials can: Provide complete and accurate visibility of VMware servers (ESX and guest virtual machines) and their SAN-based storage infrastructure. Accurately track, report, and forecast storage usage in VMware environments to optimize and plan for storage investments. Automate the process of provisioning storage resources to VMware servers. Lastly, when deploying VMware with HP Arrays (EVA and XP), Storage Essentials provides the capabilities to also monitor, view, and report deep application/ storage array performance metrics to troubleshoot and enable application performance. Comprehensive visibility into VM/storage dependencies SE leverages storage management standards like Storage Management Infrastructure Specification (SMI-S). Storage Essentials provides accurate and detailed storage and SAN infrastructure configuration data. By extending this discovery to VMware servers, through the VMware VirtualCenter and its VI SDK Web service, Storage Essentials can now provide agentless visibility into a virtual machine and its storage dependencies. Leveraging VirtualCenter, Storage Essentials can provide deep details of the VM and the ESX server including VMFS file systems, VMDK datastore, raw device mapping (RDM), and the virtual and physical HBA configurations. Once discovered, Storage Essentials will stitch the server and storage data to provide intuitive configuration and topological views of the discovered server/storage environment. Optionally, the customer can also deploy a lightweight agent on the guest VM to get deep visibility into the applications (like Oracle database, SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange) as well as volume manager and multi-pathing software deployed within the VM. Leveraging the intuitive topology maps, users can: Understand and analyzing how storage is configured and used by hosts, VMware servers, databases, and storage systems. Audit VM/ESX, multi-pathing, and redundancy configurations. (Are my VMs multi-pathing? Are all my VMs in the Web farm configured the same way?) Manage changes by proactively understanding the impact of changes. (What VMs will be affected as I replace a SAN switch?) Reduce troubleshooting time by identifying performance bottlenecks and scoping the application/ SAN/array path. (What VM, hypervisor, SAN and storage infrastructure should I focus on to troubleshoot an application issue?) 3

4 Figure 1: HP Storage Essentials discovers VMware to storage configurations and dependencies to provide comprehensive server and storage visibility to server and storage administrators. Figure 2: HP Storage Essentials tracks capacity at every tier in the VMware ESX/ Virtual Server to storage tier. Accurate storage resource capacity management HP Storage Essentials gives enterprises the big picture views of their VMware servers and their supporting storage environment. Storage Essentials capacity manager provides current, historical, and projected capacity information for all supported business applications, guest OS, VMware ESX datastore, fabric switches, and storage systems. For each resource type, capacity information is presented in the appropriate context for that resource. For example, HP Storage Essentials provides: Available, utilized, and free capacity (and percent calculations) for guest OS volumes and VMware VMFS volumes, used and available ports for a fabric switch mapped, unmapped, unallocated, and unused raw capacity for disk pools in a storage system Storage Essentials also provides the capability to accurately manage VMware clusters resources. Using Storage Essentials Cluster Manager, users can flexibly group several ESX servers based on the shared datastore. These cluster relationships help develop capacity reports that help eliminate double counting of storage at the datastore level. Historical trends are available for every resource, and can be charted over any length of time by day, week, month, or year. In addition, trends can be extrapolated over a user-defined period to forecast future capacity demands, enabling customers to see which logical and physical resources will exhaust capacity soon, thus allowing customers to optimize their storage resources. Leveraging this knowledge, Storage Essentials customers can address these questions in their environment: How many more VM guests can be placed on existing datastores? How much time do I have before I run out of storage capacity? What s the total capacity consumed by all VMware farms? Lastly, Storage Essentials also provides flexible policies to alert customers when their capacity utilization reaches a pre-determined threshold. These policies can be set for mount points, file systems, and database table spaces and can be based on available free space or utilization. A trigger can be set to generate alarms or execute custom scripts. 4

5 Figure 3: HP Storage Essentials provides out-of-the box virtualization-centric reports. Figure 4: HP Storage Essentials Report Optimizer provides best-in-class reporting, customization, and dashboards. Best-in-class reporting and dashboard Storage Essentials also provides several out-of-box VMware-centric utilization reports. These reports summarize capacity use by guest operating systems (OSs), VMware ESX servers, VMFS, connection types by switch, port utilization by storage system, and more. To support custom reporting, HP Storage Essentials provides the best-in-class Report Optimizer module. The Report Optimizer provides powerful, custom, ad hoc, and interactive reporting capabilities to satisfy the customer s unique audit, service-level management, compliance, and communications needs. An intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to quickly analyze data and answer questions or design and deliver custom reports that empower business and end users with actionable business intelligence for better business outcomes. Report Optimizer provides out-of-the-box reports for VMware storage capacity management; customers can create, customize, and distribute new custom reports in a matter of minutes using the preconfigured solution. Using the HP Storage Essentials reporting capabilities, customers can address these issues: Calculate the storage costs of applications, business units, departments, etc. Develop clear, accurate, and objective cost justification for future storage purchases. Provide real-time, access controlled storage reports to server administrators, so that they can actively view, manage, and optimize the storage allocations to their VMware server and applications. Automated and error-free provisioning of storage resources to VMware server HP Storage Essentials Provisioning Manager module decreases errors and accelerates the process of provisioning storage to physical and virtual servers. The provisioning manager extends the HP Storage Essentials SRM suite with device-specific and guided-path provisioning of SAN to physical and virtual servers. This path provisioning feature takes advantage of the suite s auto-discovery, dependency management, and capacity management capabilities to offer templates that escort you step by step through provisioning operations. Using the built-in job queue and scheduler, you can quickly create hundreds of provisioning jobs and set them up to run during off hours to reduce business impact. This module reduces the need to launch device managers for logical unit number (LUN) carving, modification, and deletion. It also reduces the need to launch Fibre Channel (FC) switch device management tools for zone configuration setup and ongoing changes. With support for VMware technologies, customers can leverage the Provisioning manager to dramatically improve the automation scale and reduce the time and errors to provision storage to the fast-changing server environment. 5

6 Figure 5: HP Storage Essentials provides an intuitive wizard-based solution to provision storage quickly and with zero errors. Figure 6: HP Storage Essentials performance pack provides application/storage array performance metrics to troubleshoot storage performance issues in physical and virtual environments. Virtual server to storage array performance management The HP Storage Essentials performance pack provides end-to-end SAN and HP storage array (EVA and XP) performance management. This view is one of the keys to identifying emerging or potential problems and enabling proactive work to avoid performance bottlenecks. The performance pack provides a unified and powerful interface that helps IT staff quickly visualize the big performance picture of one or multiple HP EVAs, XPs, and SAN infrastructures, from the business application down to the spindle. HP Storage Essentials Performance pack enables customers to gather application, server, SAN, and storage array performance metrics in near real-time. Metrics tracked include: Storage array: disk, FC port, controller and storage system total input/output (I/O) rate, total data rate, read rate, read data rate, read hit rate, write rate, write data rate, write percent, read percent, etc. SAN metrics: aggregate ports bytes received/ transmitted, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) errors, link failures, etc. Server: CPU percent usage, free and used physical/ virtual memory usage, HBA transmitted/received data, etc. Application: Oracle total I/O percent, read/write percent, buffer ratio, redo log request ratio, ratio, Exchange Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) queue size, unreachable queue size, directory lookup queue size, etc. Leveraging the intuitive side-by-side performance metric graphs, IT administrators can: Gain a unified performance view of the entire HP EVA, XP, and SAN environment Simplify end-to-end troubleshooting for quick problem identification Enable real-time performance data gathering Extrapolate trends to forecast future performance Managing the virtual data center integrated server, storage, and applications automation With virtualization, the lines between the server, storage, and network teams and solutions are blurring. For example, to scale up an application, the server administrator not only has to provision a VM, but also its storage and the network resources and it do it all in a coordinated and timely fashion to deliver on the agility benefits of virtualization. To support this integrated automation need, Storage Essentials leverages the HP Business Service Automation (BSA) suite. The HP Business Service Automation suite is an integrated suite of products that enables end-to-end IT service automation including applications, servers, network, and storage infrastructure. 6

7 Figure 7: HP Storage Essentials is integrated to HP Operations Orchestration and the HP Business Service Automation suite to manage and coordinate application, server, storage, network processes. Key products in the HP BSA suite include: HP Server Automation, which enables server administrations to discover, configure, provision, and scale physical and virtual servers (including VMware) and mission-critical applications like Oracle, WebLogic, and WebSphere HP Network Automation, which enables network administrators to discover, configure, and provision heterogeneous network devices including switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, etc. HP Operations Orchestration: HP Operations Orchestration is a run book automation technology and orchestrates end-to-end IT processes. It provides out-of-the-box integration to many of the commonly used IT applications (system management applications, automation application, monitoring solutions, help desk, trouble ticket solutions, etc.). HP BSA offers many virtualization-centric workflows that integrate server, storage, and network tasks in the virtualized environment: HP Operations Orchestration coordinates the end-toend process and the various steps in the process. HP Server Automation provisions the virtual servers and applications. HP Storage Essentials creates and provisions storage to the virtual server. HP Network Automation configures network resources and settings. By providing the automation technologies and the orchestration engine, Storage Essentials allows its customers to fully automate their virtual infrastructure management. Summary Host virtualization like VMware provides powerful capabilities to improve server utilization and reduce server capital expenditures. However, as customers deploy this technology, it is imperative that they should also consider storage management solutions to alleviate the newly created virtual server/san storage complexity. Smart IT shops are using HP Storage Essentials to improve storage/san management in VMware environments. HP Storage Essentials provides: Complete and automated VMware/storage visibility to improve shared understanding of the storage environments Optimized virtual server storage utilization and reduced storage budgets Automated storage operations to reduce errors and accelerate time to provision storage to virtual servers Application/storage performance management to enable fast troubleshooting and high storage service level agreements (SLAs) in HP storage array environments To find more information about HP Storage Essentials, go to 7

8 Technology for better business outcomes To learn more, visit Copyright 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Microsoft is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. 4AA2-5727ENW, May 2009