Enterprise Clustered File System for Hyper-V

Supports Live Migration, provides flexible backup options, improves performance and scalability

Sanbolic’s Melio Virtualization Suite  can be used with Hyper-V to provide a shared LUN to all host servers for virtual machine files, providing improved scalability and performance, as well as VSS-based snapshot capability. In addition, Melio DataCenter Suite can be installed on Hyper-V guest servers to provide concurrent read-write access to application data on a SAN, as well as features such as remote volume management and Quality of Service management. This functionality is not available from Microsoft or VMware.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V is Microsoft’s hypervisor-based server virtualization solution, which is available as part of select versions of Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and Datacenter editions also provide integrated failover clustering at no additional charge, when used in combination with Hyper-V allows customers to move virtual servers between physical hosts. Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V adds the ability to use Live Migration to move virtual machines, in addition to the Quick Migration available with the first release of Hyper-V. Although Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V does not include a cluster file system like VMware’s VMFS, it has added Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV). CSV uses a metadata controller to allow multiple servers to mount a single LUN formatted with NTFS (which is not a clustered file system) for the Hyper-V workload only. This allows users to avoid the need to configure a separate storage LUN for each virtual machine, as was required in the initial Hyper-V release.

Sanbolic’s Melio product suites can be used instead of CSV to provide an easy to install, high performance, clustered file system for Hyper-V, together with backup and storage infrastructure management features not available with VMware vSphere. The product suite for basic shared LUN and snapshot capability using Melio clustered file system starts at $249 per Hyper-V host.

   Key benefits of Sanbolic’s shared storage solutions with Hyper-V:

• Hyper-V virtual machine images can be stored on a single shared volume on SAN storage, enabling any virtual machine to be easily and quickly moved to any physical host server. Live Migration is supported. Windows Hyper-V failover clustering recognizes Sanbolic’s software as an active-active storage resource and configures it appropriately. System Center Virtual Machines Manager 2008 R2 is also supported.
• Host clusters of up to 256 nodes are supported.  Multiple Hyper-V failover clusters can be configured using a single LUN. High I/O virtual machine workloads are supported.
• Backup software that supports VSS can backup any VM from any hypervisor in the cluster. The backup can include VMs running on other hypervisors.
• Supports network access to the shared volume via CIFS or NFS
• Windows guest servers running on Hyper-V can have concurrent shared read and write access to application data on a SAN volume, providing multiple paths to the data, application scalability, and improved performance for multi-tier applications.
• Multiple storage arrays can be aggregated into a single pool of storage that can be configured and assigned centrally using a simple intuitive interface. Volumes can be dynamically expanded.
• Reporting on storage I/O and transaction performance facilitates optimization of storage intensive workloads. The file system also incorporates quality of service assignment to allow prioritization of defined virtual machines or processes in storage bandwidth-constrained environments.
• Sanbolic’s clustered file system and volume manager are very easy to install and manage, and can be used with any industry standard iSCSI or fibre channel storage hardware.

Melio FS provides a shared LUN to all Hyper-V hosts for virtual machine files and can provide a shared LUN to guest servers for application data.