Reviewing the Importance of Storage Design
Storage design has always been important, but it becomes more so for virtualized infrastructure, for mission-critical applications, and for offerings based on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). You can probably imagine why this is the case:
- Advanced Capabilities Many of vSphere's advanced features depend on shared storage; vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT), and some parts of VMware Site Recovery Manager all have critical dependencies on shared storage.
- Performance People understand the benefits that virtualization brings—consolidation, higher utilization, more flexibility, and higher efficiency. But often, people have initial questions about how vSphere can deliver performance for individual applications when it is inherently consolidated and oversubscribed. Likewise, the overall performance of the VMs and the entire vSphere cluster both depend on shared storage...