Brochure HP Storage Solutions for VMware Virtualization
I. Virtualization is changing the world To help reduce costs and increase efficiency, availability, and flexibility of their IT organizations, businesses of all sizes are turning to virtualization. VMware vsphere is an industry-leading virtualization platform that, when combined with flexible server, storage, and networking technologies from HP, can create a powerful and dynamic data center that serves as the platform for private and public clouds. To maximize the benefits offered by VMware virtualization, you need to start with the right storage foundation one that can deliver the availability, efficiency, manageability, and performance required by virtual server, desktop, and private cloud environments. Yesterday s solutions won t solve tomorrow s problems. With HP Storage for VMware solutions, you have a powerful and flexible infrastructure that stores, protects, and manages your virtual servers and desktops. As part of the HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Storage solutions integrate with HP servers, networking, and software to deliver a new level of agility and efficiency. II. Virtualization environment challenges The shared nature of resources in a virtual environment dictates specific capabilities that storage must deliver to serve as a solid foundation. These capabilities include: Performance When virtual machines (VMs) are consolidated, they squeeze storage performance as the array becomes the focal point as many vsphere hosts are needed simultaneously. Workloads in a virtualized environment are unpredictable with random and frequently occurring I/O. As a result, storage must be resilient enough to handle numerous hosts and must fully support mixed workloads. Availability VMs are only as available as the storage they reside on. Storage in vsphere environments must be protected at many levels including disks, controllers, and nodes to ensure survival and not cause disruptions should potential failures occur. Simplicity Virtualization introduces complexity into the data center, with particular complexity directly impacting storage. Storage must be as simple to manage and maintain as possible and not add unnecessary complexity to the vsphere environment. Efficiency Storage capital expenditures often detract from the savings of implementing virtualization. Organizations have historically bought more storage when they run into capacity or performance barriers. Storage needs to be optimized for virtualized environments to maximize efficiency so that capacity and performance barriers do not create additional expenses. Most storage today is unable to keep up with the demands of server and client virtualization. As a result, deploying VMware vsphere incorrectly can be challenging and cost-prohibitive, therefore detracting from the core benefits offered by VMware virtualization solutions. HP is uniquely positioned to deliver storage that meets the requirements of virtualized environments. HP Converged Storage products such as the LeftHand and 3PAR Storage arrays serve as a solid foundation for building demanding virtualized environments, along with HP StoreOnce Backup Systems for protection. III. HP and VMware partnership: delivering a more agile and efficient IT environment For nearly 10 years HP and VMware have worked together to deliver on the promise of virtualization and to create a more cost-effective, agile, and efficient IT infrastructure. As strategic partners, HP and VMware collaborate across storage, servers, networking, security, software, and services to offer solutions for VMware vsphere built on HP s proven, Converged Infrastructure. HP and VMware work together on projects that include certification, integration, new technology development, reference architectures, and best practice guides. In addition, as both a VMware Global Technology Alliance Partner and the industry s leading original equipment manufacturer of VMware software, HP offers more VMware solution expertise than any other VMware partner: HP offers more VMware-certified storage and server models than any other vendor. HP Technology and Enterprise Services have more than 1200 VMware certified professionals. HP is an official VMware Global System Integrator/System Outsourcer Partner and a VMware Premier Enterprise Partner. HP Education Services is one of the largest global VMware Authorized Training Centers. HP Technology Services has been an authorized VMware service partner since 2003. All HP shared storage products are qualified and listed in the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide and the Storage Virtual Appliance program. Through HP s industry-leading partnership with VMware, HP Storage offers advanced integration across VMware s storage initiatives, ranging from vcenter Server, to vsphere Storage application programming interface (APIs), to vcenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM). In addition, to improve your overall experience after deployment, you can purchase VMware software from HP with HP support giving you one source of support for your servers, storage, networking, and virtualization software. 2
Optimize availability and performance Simplify provisioning and management Save on storage costs Small to midsized business LeftHand Network RAID Multi-Site SAN Peer motion data mobility Application Aware Snapshot Manager vcenter Management plug-in vsphere Storage API and SRM integration All-inclusive SAN software suite Thin provisioning Pay as you grow w/ clustered nodes Enterprise and service provider 3PAR Wide-striping Mixed workload support VMware VAAI support Autonomic groups vcenter Management plug-in vsphere Storage API and SRM integration Thin Provisioning, conversion, and persistence Automatic zero detect Adaptive optimization Backup and recovery StoreOnce Autonomic restart Built-in hardware redundancy Backup speeds up to 28 TB/hour Consolidated management interface Centralized backup of remote sites Leading backup application integration Pay as you grow scalability Couplet based licensing De-duplication reduces backup data up to 20x IV. Enhance your VMware virtualization environment with HP storage The requirements for what storage must deliver in a virtualized environment are clear. Imagine what you can achieve by combining the power of VMware vsphere with storage platforms designed to eliminate the challenges of server and client virtualization. Fortunately, you don t have to imagine it. HP s next generation of Converged Storage solutions are designed to enhance the benefits of VMware vsphere, VMware View, and VMware vcloud Solutions. With HP Storage supporting your VMware deployments you are able to: Optimize VM density, availability, and business continuity (BC) Simplify provisioning and management with less storage and vsphere complexity Save on storage costs through better capacity utilization and efficiencies HP 3PAR and LeftHand Storage, along with HP StoreOnce Backup Systems, deliver these benefits with the following capabilities: 3
HP 3PAR Storage provides at least double the VM density compared to traditional, legacy storage arrays VMware ESXi Legacy storage VMware ESXi 3PAR VM Density with vsphere using legacy storage VM Density with vsphere using 3PAR Storage V. Using HP storage to overcome virtualization challenges From small businesses to large enterprises, HP storage offers a wide range of solutions to extend the value of your specific VMware environment. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to virtualization and HP can deliver a storage solution that meets your needs and requirements. HP LeftHand Storage, optimized for small to mid-sized businesses deploying VMware virtual server and desktop environments, is based on a clustered storage architecture that eliminates single points of failure and scales-out non-disruptively in capacity and performance. Built on industry-standard HP ProLiant and BladeSystem hardware, and using HP scale-out software and converged management, the HP LeftHand portfolio offers affordable enterprise functionality with an all-inclusive feature set and a pay-as-you grow model for small to mid-sized businesses. HP 3PAR Storage, the next generation of Tier 1 storage for virtualized enterprise and service provider environments, combines autonomically managed and dynamically tiered storage arrays with advanced internal virtualization capabilities to increase administrative efficiency, system utilization, and storage performance. By enabling the consolidation of multiple workloads while simultaneously reducing operational costs on a modern architecture, HP 3PAR Storage is designed specifically for the unpredictable demands of virtualization, the cloud, and IT-as-a-Service. HP StoreOnce provides high-performance and cost-effective disk-based data protection targets for data centers and remote offices to help overcome challenges presented by the backup and recovery of virtual environments to unique areas like service level agreements, recovery time objectives, and recovery point objectives. The rapid growth of VMs creates a lot of data and most of this data is not unique. HP StoreOnce Backup systems, with local deduplication to reduce storage and bandwidth needs, integrate seamlessly into your VMware environment; expanding as backup requirements grow. VI. Challenge: eliminating performance bottlenecks that limit VM density HP Solution: Optimize and increase VM density through unique HP storage performance features. To maximize the return on investment (ROI) and benefits that virtualization provides, you need to increase efficiency and drive VM density as high as possible. High VM density helps dramatically lower virtual infrastructure acquisition and operational costs. Storage often becomes the limiting factor to achieving higher VM density as it is a single resource that is shared across all the hosts in the environment. Therefore, selecting storage that is designed to handle the unique demands of virtualized environments is critical to achieving your desired growth and levels of consolidation. HP 3PAR Storage eliminates the barriers to increased VM density that you encounter with traditional storage arrays. The HP 3PAR Mesh Active architecture and wide striping capabilities allow you to double VM density and dynamically balance workloads across the entire array. HP 3PAR provides consistent levels of performance regardless of the capacity utilization of the array and eliminates storage bottlenecks typically encountered in vsphere environments. 4
HP LeftHand Multi-Site SAN allows data to be seamlessly stretched across remote data centers Site 1 Site 2 Low-latency link VMware highly available server infrastructure VMware vsphere VMware vsphere VMware vsphere VMware vsphere VMware vsphere VMware vsphere VMware vsphere VMware vsphere HP HP LeftHand LeftHand Multi-Site Multi-site SAN SAN Single volumes stretched across locations HP LeftHand Storage has a clustered node architecture that enables non-disruptive scaling of performance and capacity. Unlike traditional storage area network (SAN) storage architectures, LeftHand nodes scale capacity and performance linearly to seamlessly grow with your business. All LeftHand Storage clusters are pre-optimized to balance performance and capacity resources within the node so that customers can start with what they need today and easily grow by adding storage nodes to their clusters without taking systems offline. VII. Challenge: improve availability and business continuity HP Solution: Optimize application availability and data protection by ensuring always-on and protected VMs. Virtualization provides many benefits, but there is also a certain level of risk that virtualization brings to the data center. Hardware failures in virtual environments, due to their consolidated nature, can be highly disruptive compared to physical environments. VMware vsphere environments can utilize features like High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerance (FT) to minimize the impact of a host failure, but these features provide no protection against storage failures. Storage that is used with vsphere must have no single points of failure and be able to withstand the failure of any storage component. HP LeftHand Storage is designed to maximize application availability in virtualized environments. This is achieved through built-in protection against data faults and site failures, as well as the ability to scale non-disruptively. Network RAID stripes and protects multiple copies of data across a cluster of storage nodes, eliminating any single point of failure. The HP LeftHand Multi-Site SAN, certified with vsphere, provides users with the ability to assign storage nodes in the cluster to different sites across racks, rooms, buildings, and cities. Based on this assignment, the software automatically makes the appropriate configuration and operational decisions to protect data from site failure. This can be utilized in conjunction with the vsphere HA and FT features to provide high or continuous availability across sites separated by distances. The Peer Motion feature available on both 3PAR and LeftHand arrays provides data mobility so data can be migrated from one cluster to another without disruption to applications and without taking systems offline. Peer Motion compliments VMware Storage vmotion by offloading the migration of clusters to the array, therefore eliminating the burden placed on server and network resources. Disaster recovery and BC demands that virtual environments be protected beyond local failures and many companies must extend this protection to off-site locations as well. All HP storage solutions feature Storage Replication Adapters that allow integration with VMware s vcenter SRM. This provides the ability to work directly with SRM to stage and automate the process of failing over to a remote site. Protecting applications and their data is just as important as protecting whole VMs, as well as both 3PAR and LeftHand arrays including application-aware snapshot capabilities that support oneclick, application-consistent, point-in-time snapshots for VMware virtual machine file system (VMFS) datastores to ensure fast and reliable VM recovery. 5
Virtualization requires re-thinking the backup environment. Industry leading backup applications, combined with the multiplatform support and solution flexibility of HP StoreOnce, provide superior value to VM-intensive environments. HP StoreOnce provides VM-specific benefits such as improved de-duplication and smooth VMware integration. VIII. Challenge: costs associated with storage growth and inefficiencies HP Solution: Save costs through improved storage utilization and efficiencies To achieve maximum virtualization ROI, reducing both capital expenses and operational costs is important. Storage is often the most costly part of a virtual environment so being able to drive down the cost of storage will help minimize your upfront costs and maximize your long term savings. Often, because of inefficiencies with traditional storage arrays, more storage is purchased than is necessary to meet capacity and/or performance requirements of virtual environments. Most virtual environments tend to have rapid growth due to the ease of deploying new VMs which can quickly consume limited storage resources. Having storage that is both efficient and easy to non-disruptively scale to meet future growth needs is important. HP 3PAR thin technologies allow you to reduce your capacity requirements by breaking the traditional link between allocated and purchased capacity. HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning software enables you to allocate as much logical capacity to a VMFS volume as needed without dedicating any physical capacity up front. This translates into less capacity to purchase up front and less power and cooling costs over the long term, which eliminates waste. HP 3PAR Thin Conversion software provides you with the ability to get thin by converting fully-provisioned fat volumes from other storage platforms into more efficient thin volumes, which allows you to purchase up to 50% less capacity. HP 3PAR Thin Persistence helps you stay thin as your data demands change. HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization Software provides a granular, policy-driven, autonomic storage tiering solution that delivers service level optimization at the lowest possible cost while increasing agility and minimizing risk. HP LeftHand Storage allows you to pay-as-you-grow so you can scale capacity and performance as needed. Unlike traditional SAN storage architectures, LeftHand SANs scale capacity and performance linearly to seamlessly grow with your business and don t require systems to go offline. LeftHand SAN also offers reservation-less thin provisioning, meaning that the system s capacity is only dedicated as you write to the volume. Thin provisioning efficiencies underlie every HP LeftHand SAN function including snapshots, remote copy, volume migration, and asynchronous replication, providing excellent capacity utilization with the potential for significant storage cost savings. The all-inclusive management suite included with HP LeftHand solutions delivers an array of value-added tools required to integrate your LeftHand Storage with your VMware environment. This eliminates the need to purchase additional software and services to get your solution up and running, helping to drive down total cost of ownership. HP StoreOnce drives backup costs down by eliminating redundant data that exists in your virtual environment. VMs have a lot of similar data since they typically run the same operating systems and applications. Backing-up and storing all that redundant data gets very expensive over time. The de-duplication that HP StoreOnce provides optimizes your backup storage capacity by identifying and eliminating redundant data which allows more data to be stored on the same disk footprint. HP StoreOnce can provide up to a 20x reduction of backup data in vsphere environments to drastically reduce the amount of duplicate data. This translates into big savings as it lowers disk capacity requirements and all the associated operational expenses. IX. Challenge: complexity in deploying and managing storage within your VMware environment HP Solution: Streamline and simplify storage deployment and management The dynamic nature of virtualized environments can create havoc with most storage systems. The mapping and visibility of storage through multiple layers and components (VMs, hosts, logical unit number devices, switches, host bus adapter s, etc.) creates management complexity. In addition, VMs are always on the move, both from host to host, and from storage device to storage device, which can make management even more complex. Even in environments that have dedicated SAN administrators, storage can be difficult to manage on both sides as there is no visibility between virtual storage assets and physical storage assets. As a result, management integration is a must in order to simplify operational tasks and to eliminate the added complexity of a vsphere environment. HP 3PAR Storage can reduce provisioning and management by up to 90% through autonomic management features such as HP 3PAR Autonomic Groups, which eliminates tedious manual repetition of commands when provisioning storage to VMware host clusters. HP LeftHand Storage is designed to be simple to get up and running quickly. From out of the box, to rack and stack, and on through the software setup wizard you can have volumes configured and ready to use. The management console for LeftHand Storage allows you to centrally manage all of your LeftHand nodes to help ease you through the installation and configuration process. 6
Managing HP storage using the Insight Control Storage Module plug-in for vcenter Server For integrated management, HP offers a single plug-in so you can manage and monitor every part of your physical environment inside of vcenter Server. The Insight Control plug-in for vcenter Server allows you to manage physical servers, storage, and networking assets from a single tab inside of vcenter Server. The HP Insight Control Storage Module plug-in works with the LeftHand and 3PAR arrays to enable integrated monitoring of HP storage arrays and provisioning of HP storage. The Storage Module plug-in delivers powerful HP hardware management capabilities to VMware administrators, enabling comprehensive deployment, provisioning, monitoring, remote control, and power optimization directly from the vsphere client. This gives VMware administrators enhanced visibility into storage resources and precise insight into how VMs are mapped to datastores and physical storage volumes. Specific physical storage information such as component health, RAID levels, drive types, and volume types are displayed within vcenter Server which helps reduce administration time and improves clarity between the virtual and physical layers. To provide even more integration between vcenter Server and storage devices, HP 3PAR and LeftHand arrays fully support the vsphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA). VASA allows vcenter Server to detect the capabilities of the storage array volumes and expose them to the vcenter environment providing a foundation for qualityof-service-based profile management. The information provided by VASA can be used with vcenter Server storage profiles for policy-based placement and rebalancing of VMs to maintain required service levels. 7
HP VirtualSystem VS1 Mid-market HP VirtualSystem VS2 Enterprise HP VirtualSystem VS3 Large enterprise VirtualSystems HP also offers complete turnkey solutions for both server and client virtualization for those that want to avoid the complexity, time and expense of trying to design and build your own vsphere environment. HP VirtualSystem for VMware delivers a Converged Infrastructure consisting of best in class HP storage, servers, networking and software that is delivered pre-tested, pre-configured and ready to run with VMware software installed. VirtualSystems provide you with the fastest time to value by eliminating many of the complex and costly steps in developing a virtualization environment. X. HP storage services for virtualization HP offers a comprehensive range of services to assess, design, implement, and manage your VMware environment. From strategy and planning, through migration and modernization, HP experts ensure that you can bridge business and technology to gain full value from your storage investments. HP has over 20 years of experience in designing and implementing storage solutions. Now we meld server virtualization with storage virtualization for an end-to-end solution. Services HP offers that will help you with your VMware environment include: Storage Modernization for Virtualized Environments This provides alternative reference architectures that integrate new technology with existing infrastructure and defines the envisioned target storage environment based on a proven solution design methodology. Data Migration Services - HP will discover your source data and help you model a target environment, assess data quality and infrastructure remediation, and design a migration plan that achieves your migration goals. We will test and build the process, then run the migration so your data and VMs will be seamlessly migrated to the new environment. Storage Preparedness for Cloud - Ensure that your storage infrastructure can support your cloud initiatives. HP will assess your readiness by reviewing the technologies you have in place to deliver cloud services and match recommended data locations to servicelevel requirements. You ll get a practical reference architecture as well as a detailed business case and cost justification. Backup/Recovery Modernization - Optimize your backup/recovery solution to meet the needs of your VMware environment. Practical deliverables include reference architecture, cost analysis, and justification for any new hardware or software needed. XI. Summary HP Converged Storage are next-generation storage systems designed to deliver high-performance, HA, efficient storage utilization, and simplified management for virtual server and client environments. HP Converged Storage will help you optimize, simplify and reduce costs in your VMware deployments. Get connected hp.com/go/getconnected Get the insider view on tech trends, support alerts and HP solutions. Share with colleagues Copyright 2011-2012 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. 4AA3-6683ENW, Created August 2011; Updated June 2012, Rev. 1