Shared SAN Data Access for Virtual Machines

Improve data availability, application performance, and application scale out on Hyper-V, ESX, or Xen virtual machines

Overview

Sanbolic’s software provides an advanced, enterprise class clustered file system and clustered volume manager that can be used in conjunction with VMware ESX and VMware server to provide capabilities not supported by VMFS. Sanbolic software installs easily in host or guest servers and can be used with any industry standard iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage hardware.

VMware vSphere includes a component called VMFS that is a type of clustered file system that allows virtual machine files to be stored on a shared SAN LUN accessible to all host servers.  Shared access to the LUN enables the ability to use Live Migration to move active virtual machines across host servers.  VMFS is a limited-functionality clustered file system that uses SCSI reservation for file level locking.  It cannot be used to provide shared access to application data on SAN storage from virtual machines.  It also cannot be used to provide shared access to virtual machines files on a SAN LUN when VMware Server is being used.

Key advantages of Sanbolic software in VMware server virtualization deployments:

• Windows guest servers running on VMware ESX 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

• VMware Server 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 other physical host server.

• Backup software that supports VSS can backup the whole file system or any individual file from any host in the cluster

• 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, and protected using RAID 1 (software mirroring) included in Sanbolic’s Data Center product suite.

• Windows Active Directory, DFS, and clustering features are supported.

• Sanbolic’s AppCluster enables active-active SQL clusters to be easily configured for availability or load balancing without any dependency on Windows Failover Clustering.

• 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 VMDKs or workloads in storage bandwidth-constrained environments.

• Sanbolic’s product suite is very easy to install and manage, and can be used with any industry standard iSCSI or fibre channel storage hardware.

Sanbolic’s Melio FS enables concurrent shared access to application data on SAN storage volumes from multiple guest servers running on ESX. For VMware Server deployments (not shown) Melio can provide VMFS-like functionality, enabling all virtual machine file to be stored on a shared LUN, facilitating migration of guest servers across physical hosts.

For more information:
sales@sanbolic.com or call +1 617 833 4242.