Kayo fs
Kayo FS provides file-level shared access to a SAN volume from multiple physical host servers and is designed specifically to provide a cost-effective shared LUN solution for Hyper-V virtual machines. Kayo simplifies storage management in virtual environments by allowing all Hyper-V virtual machines to be stored on a single shared LUN, while allowing virtual machines to be moved independently among physical host servers. Kayo FS provides VMFS-like functionality for Microsoft Hyper-V, and eliminates the need to create a separate storage LUN for each virtual machine. Pricing for Kayo is $299 per host server in a five license bundle. Kayo will be available in August.

How do I use Kayo?

Kayo provides functionality similar to that provided by VMFS in the VMware virtualization suite.

Kayo installs easily on each physical host server.  Each of the physical servers needs to have access to a volume on a shared LUN on an iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage array. Kayo is compatible with any iSCSI or Fibre Channel Storage hardware.  An iSCSI target from a Windows Unified Data Storage Server can also be used for the shared LUN.

The shared volume is formatted with Kayo fs, and is used to store all of the .vhd files for Hyper-V. Although Hyper-V allows a given virtual machine to be running on only one virtual machine at a time, all physical hosts have access to the vhd files on the shared volume. When Quick Migration is used, the virtual machine is moved from one host to another, but there is no need to change anything at the storage layer.

Without Kayo, Quick Migration can still be used, but during the migration access to the entire storage LUN is moved from one physical host to the other host. All virtual machines on that LUN will be migrated. Hence, in order to migrate virtual machines independently, each needs to be stored on a separate storage LUN.  Kayo greatly simplifies storage management by allowing all machines to be stored on a single shared LUN.

How does Kayo fs differ from Melio fs?

Kayo is designed specifically to simplify storage management for small Hyper-V virtualization environments.  Like VMware’s VMFS (when used with ESX), it allows multiple physical host servers to have shared access at the file level to a shared volume containing virtual machine files.

Kayo is not designed to provide shared read write access to application data, or to manage storage for large virtualization environments.

Melio fs is an advanced enterprise clustered file system that provides concurrent read write access to data on a shared volume over a SAN fabric. When used with LaScala clustered volume manager, it provides advanced storage management capabilities for large physical and virtual environments.  Like, Kayo fs, Melio and LaScala can be used to provide a shared LUN for Hyper-V virtual machines.  Sanbolic recommends the use of Melio in large virtualization environments.  Melio fs can also be used to provide shared access to application data from physical or virtual Windows servers (including servers running on VMware ESX).  This provides increased flexibility, improved high availability options, and the ability to scale out many applications by having multiple servers working with a single copy of data.

Please visit the Melio fs and LaScala product pages for more information about these products.

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Distributed Data Center Virtualization using Kayo FS and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Failover Clustering beta release (pdf) 2084