Working out what storage to use with virtualisation
This is a tricky one as, if like me, you were starting out with no real base lines to work with then it’s a bit “finger in the air” time. Of course no-one actually admits to doing that but ultimately it will cost you more in time and effort to get accurate metrics than it will be to have an educated guess. Even then (with either method) the chances are your business will have changed within the next year or so to consume whatever it is that you have deployed and make any initial metrics moot.
So it was with some interest that I stumbled upon a paper by Brad Bonn of VKernel (now part of Dell) which talks through some of the figures and numbers you will be hit by when talking to storage vendors.
What the paper does do is talk through the use of storage within virtualisation and give you some idea of what kind of thing you are going to want from a storage solution. It doesn’t say “BUY THIS”, even though they now work for Dell, which is a good thing as all situations are different. But it does give you a starting point of what to think about when making a storage decision.
In particular Brad talks about:
- The fundamentals of storage and the types of storage you can buy
- How the physical disk eventually ends up as a drive in a VM
- Where problems can occur in SANs with overloading
- The use of IOPs (Input/Output operations per second) as a measuring device
So rather than plagurise it I direct you to the site where you can download and read for yourself :)
