Scale out NAS for VMware Virtualization by Isilon

Eliminating Storage Sprawl: Scale-out NAS for Virtualization

ASP
WEB
Linux
DEV
HR
Legacy
Legacy
SQL
LOB
File Servers
SQL
Finance
CAD /
CAM
Random
Application and Server Sprawl
Many underutilized servers and storage devices
Costly to Manage
Software updates and patches
OS Versions
Maintenance releases
Security upgrades
Backups
Power consumption
Underutilized
Low CPU, RAM, and Disk usage
In the 2 to 20% range
Sub-optimal Availability
Drives and storage components fail
Traditional clustering unreliable

Physical Storage
VMware Solves the Server Sprawl Problem
Servers are virtualized and stacked
Isilon’s Focus
Run applications side-by-side
VMware safely partitions servers into shared resource pools
Stack applications within server
Reduce physical server footprint
Fewer servers to manage and backup
Increase server utilization
Since Virtual Machines (VMs) share server resources, each effectively can run at a higher utilization rate
Server resources shared
Centralize server management
Example: backup multiple VMs (within one server) from a single point

Virtualization Storage Challenges
Technical Challenge
Impact to Business
Server & storage proliferation
Volumes locked to servers
Storage not easily shared
Monolithic scale-up storage not well-suited to virtualization
Scalability limited
Force over-buying / provisioning
Storage complexity, brittleness
Forces trade-offs in reliability for performance (or vice versa)

Management complexity drives up operational costs
Increased staff time
Trade-offs in protection levels, backups, and performance
Supply-side approach inflates capitol costs
Inefficient, unused system resources
Hinders business agility
Limits business agility
Systems hard to adapt
Changes introduce risk.

LUNs
Storage Sprawl on SANs
SANs require serious planning and flawless execution of operations
Configuring LUNs, partitions, zoning
RDMs or VMFS?
Host file systems (NTFS, ext3)
Ad hoc components
Fiber channel HBAs
Severe complexity at scale
LUNs > volumes > zones > ports > HBAs > servers > VMs > VMFS

File Server Sprawl on NAS
Easy to Buy—not soEasy to Own, Scale, and Manage
LUN sprawl (hidden complexity)
“SAN”: RAID groups > Aggregates > Volumes > LUNs > File Systems > HBAs > Host File Systems (VMFS)
NAS: all of the above except HBAs and VMFS
File system sprawl (complexity at scale)
Other issues: availability, cost, etc.
/fs/01, /fs/02
RAID Groups & LUNs
Storage Device #1
/fs/03, /fs/04
RAID Groups & LUNs
Storage Device #2
/fs/05, /fs/06
RAID Groups & LUNs
Storage Device #3

Scale-out NAS for Virtualization
Reduce the cost of deploying and managing storage for large-scale virtual environments by over 35%
Non-disruptive scalability
Performance
Capacity
Maximize efficiency
Higher utilization
Pay-as-you-grow
Volume-free provisioning
Protect all Virtual Machines Cost-effectively
Variable protection levels
Clustered: NO SPOF
All-Active HA failover
Right-size on-the-fly
Re-balance VMs across nodes and SmartConnect performance zones
Rapidly deploy and consolidate storage for hundreds of Virtual Machines in minutes
Setup and deploy a multi-terabyte cluster in minutes!
Single
File System
Isilon’s OneFS
Storage Device #1
Storage Device #2
Storage Device #3

Isilon IQ
Enterprise-class hardware
OneFS™intelligent
software
complete storage system
Rapidly Deploy and Consolidate Storage
Unprecedented simplicity
Easy to setup, provision, manage, and change!
Build a cluster in 30 minutes
Enterprise-class, integrated storage system
Storage nodes: performance and capacity
Expansion nodes: pure capacity
Accelerators: pure performance
Deploy virtual machines in minutes

Core Innovation The Virtualization behind Clustered Storage
Creates one giant Datastore
Single file system, single volume
Highest performance, fully symmetric cluster
Easy to manage and grow
Single unified platform across all products
9

Non-disruptive Scalability
platform nodes
Pure Performance
Accelerator
S-Series
Backup Accelerator
X-Series
Linear Scaling of Performance & Capacity
Independent Performance Scaling
Capacity nodes
EX-Series
NL-Series
Performance
Independent Capacity Scaling
Capacity

Maximize Storage EfficiencyScale-up vs. Scale-out Architecture Considerations
Source: The Total Economic Impact of Isilon’s Clustered Storage System, Forrester 2008

100% AVAILABILITY
100% AVAILABILITY
100% AVAILABILITY
100% AVAILABILITY
100% AVAILABILITY
100% AVAILABILITY
100% AVAILABILITY
100% AVAILABILITY
FAILED
FAILED
Comprehensive Data Protection
Protect all Virtual Machines–at the Right Protection Level
VMs stored on OneFS directory. For example:/ifs/farm1/vmachines
OneFS protects all data, across all nodes in cluster
All VMs striped across all nodes
N+1  N+4 set on various levels
File (individual VMs), Directory (multiple VMs), or Cluster (all VMs)
12
12

Reducing Acquisition Cost through Precision Right-Sizing
"Large organizations feel the pain of traditional SANs in large VMware deployments. With horizontal scaling of Isilon storage, we can right-size storage and performance for VMware, literally on the fly.
-- Storage Architect, World Leader in Jet Aircraft Engine Manufacturing and Testing
Start small
From 10 TBs to 250 TBs
Pay-as-you-grow
Single file systems image never change
Non-disruptively scale capacity up to 3.4 PB in a single cluster
Add pure capacity independently of performance
Easy to scale
Add performance in minutes
Add capacity nodes in minutes
Core platform nodes
S-Series
X-Series
NL-Series
Linear Scaling of Performance & Capacity
“Isilon’s scale-out file storage is inherently more power efficient than NAS silos—adding what you need in granular increments, versus the gross over-provisioning that normally accompanies monolithic infrastructure silos. Adding processing power independently also saves floor and rack space, improves performance, and significantly reduces power consumption.”

Scale-up vs. Scale-out NAS: TCOIf traditional NAS hardware were free – Isilon still offers a better 3-year TCO
Why this happens:
Staffing – ease of management
Storage utilization
Effectively scale reliably
Business Impact – Isilon is a better way to spend corporate money – freeing money to fund innovation and sustain the business
Source:The Total Economic Impact of Isilon’s Clustered Storage System, Forrester 2008

VMware on Isilon Customers

Server & Storage Consolidation
Background
Risk, financial and management consulting firm. Also provides compliance and litigation support, data analysis, e-discovery, and data archiving services.
We love what both VMware and Isilon do; the solutions are exceptionally complimentary. We’ve been able to streamline our entire IT operations, provide reliability and high availability—all by standardizing on clustered VMware servers and clustered storage from Isilon.
We even moved a mission critical VMware application off of our Hitachi SAN and found it performed better on the Isilon.
--IT Director
Infrastructure
Challenge
Managing storage for entire VMware environment
Backing up multiple virtual machines quickly
Managing more data with fewer people
Solution
Four Isilon IQ clusters in two locations—for production, e-discovery, archiving, and R&D
SnapshotIQ used to clone virtual machines
More than 70 virtual machines hosted on Isilon, including mission critical litigation app
Only four people manage entire IT department, including all applications and 75TBs of storage.

Virtual Test Labs for Management Automation
Background
The market leader in self-service virtualization automation and lab management.
Cloud hosting provider for test, development, and LOB application staging services.
Delivers end-products to name-brand accounts for IT professionals, business users, and testers/developers.
Benefits
Easy of installation and management
High availability
Performance: exceeded goals by 2x: 4Gb/sec reads from 70 VMs
Rapid provisioning: single point of management for batch-deployment of many Virtual Machines.
Cloud Hosting
Challenge
Support dynamic, large scale cloud hosting environment for 1800+ Virtual Machines, reliably, at the right price-performance. Pass strict Surgient compliance testing.
Performance on traditional NAS topped out—and scalability proved impossible. Required 2Gbps+ which traditional NAS could not provide
Solution
5 IQ12000X, 1 Accelerator X with redundant IB switches
Achieved 4Gb/sec reads from 70 VMs running Iometer
Passed all other requirements
Isilon Cluster
NAS

Summary
Scale-out NAS well suited to
Large or dynamic environments—many VMs
Smaller environments requiring simplicity
Reduce storage management costs by 35% over traditional NAS
Rapidly deploy and consolidate storage
Non-disruptively scale performance and capacity, without changes to host servers
Maximize efficiency—30% over traditional NAS
Protect all Virtual Machines cost-effectively
Fine grained data protection
Choice of certified backup partners
Optimize and right-size the system on the fly.

Backup Scenarios for Virtualization

Backup Options

Option 1: SyncIQ with VMware
Could be used to replicate and restore VMs
Best practice:
Schedule snapshots in VirtualCenter on target
Replicate snapshot delta files
Extremely flexible: replicate single or multiple VMs
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for NAS on VMware roadmap
Isilon will support SRM
VM3
VM2
VM1
SyncIQ 2 transfers entire VMDK files
SyncIQ 2.5 transfers only changed blocks

Option 2: VMware Tape BackupNDMP
Backup full VMs directly from Isilon storage to tape
Currently only 3-way NDMP
Upcoming 2-way NDMP with Isilon IQ Backup Accelerator
Use Isilon Snapshots to create point-in-time copies of VMs
Compatible with all Isilon-certified NDMP backup applications
Symantec, EMC, Commvault, Bakbone, Atempo
Upcoming IBM TSM support with Isilon IQ Backup Accelerator
VM3
VM2
VM1
NDMP file based incremental means entire VMDKs are always backed up

Option 3: VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)
Use Backup Vendor VCB proxy to coordinate VMware snapshots with backup
Backup full VM images or individual VM files on Windows VMs only.
True fullincremental VM backups – only backs up changed blocks
Compatible with all vendors that supply VCB agents.
So far have only tested with Symantec.
Uses ESX server as a resource to move backup data to VCB proxy tape

Option 4: SnapshotIQ with VMware
OneFS snapshots could be used to store VM snapshots
Storage-based snapshots
Not crash consistent
The process could be automated to create application consistent VM snapshot with VMware scripts
Take VM snapshot
Isilon snapshot
Delete VM snapshot
No instant snapshot restore: customer needs to copy snapshots manually or write scripts
8:00
VM snapped
9:14
VM restored
9:10
VM deleted

Options 5 and 6: Backup Agents
Leverage licenses already purchased
Functionality depends on Backup and Restore Application
Most support granular, object-based restore
Requires knowledge of applications inside VMs
Primary Site

High Availability Scenarios

Comprehensive High Availability
VMware HA + IsilonSmartConnect: Complementary Approaches

VMware HA monitors and detects server failures from VirtualCenter
If a server failure occurs, VMwareHA restarts VMs on a different physical server within a resource pool.

VMware HA
All-active Server High Availability

All ESX Servers mount all nodes
VMs are spread across all nodes
All VMs protected from server and storage failures
Rapid NFS failover provided for each ESX Server

SmartConnect
All-active Storage High Availability
OneFS
NFS failover using SmartConnect takes 1 to 2 seconds

Isilon SmartConnect Advanced
Highly Differentiated, All-active NFS Failover Solution for Virtualization
SmartConnect failover supported in VMware VirtualCenter 3.x
Dynamic IP addresses used in lieu of DNS zone name
VirtualCenter features such as VMotion fully supported
Capabilities
Datastore shared across multiple ESX servers
All-active NFS failover

Disaster Recovery

NFS
NFS
NFS
Disaster Recovery for VMware
DR and Backup Options for Isilon Clustered Storage:

SyncIQ: Asynchronous disk backup & remote replication
Host-based replication solutions from Partners such as Vizioncore
Certified Backup Partners: Symantec, Commvault, Bakbone, EMC

Primary Site
Recovery Site
VirtualCenter

SyncIQ for VMware Update
Replicate and restore VMs from site to site
Best-practice: Replicate ESX-based snapshots from source
Extremely flexible, could be used to replicate single or multiple VMs
SyncIQ 2 transfers entire snapshot delta or VM
VM3
VM2
VM1
Roadmap
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for NAS (Q209). Participating in beta program.
SyncIQ 2.5: transfers only changed blocks.