In the next post in his series over at community.hds.com my colleague Paul Morrissey, HDS Global Product Manager for Virtualisation, delves a little deeper into the mapping between workloads and backend capabilities.

This post focuses more on Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) and how this works in practice. So a bit more on the practical side of protocol endpoints, scalability and other questions that might arise.

SPBM is a key concept in VVol and one you need to understand before planning your implementation.

You can find the latest post HERE

I previously wrote about the need for correctly mapping the requirements of applications  to VVol capabilities. You can find that post HERE:

I am VERY SURPRISED that I have not read one other post from anyone in the VMware community talking about this. Has this been forgotten or do people suggest that everything will just “be fine” ?

My advice is this:  Before you consider VVol perform proper planning and due diligence. Work with your storage vendor and your application teams and business continuity people to ensure the correct capabilities are created before surfacing these for consumption. Prove the concept with a smaller set of capabilities (maybe just one) which you can test and educate people on.  Then expand and roll out. Don’t forget about business continuity and operational recovery – prove these use cases in your implementations.

I am confident HDS advises customers to be conservative and mitigate risk were possible – I know this from speaking to colleagues all over EMEA – customer relationships and protecting their customers is fundamental to everything they do.

You can also see this mindset at work within the design of HDS VVol implementation where ensuring minimum disruption is given priority…. From Paul’s Post ….

Question:  Would it be possible to migrate current customer’s data stores with VMs to storage containers with VVols

Paul : “That was in fact part of the original design specs and core requirements. As part of the firmware upgrade for our arrays, our VASA Providers and VVol implementations will allow for hardware-accelerated non-disruptive migration between source VMFS/NFS datastores and destination VVol storage container, via storage vMotion.”

What does this mean ? Use of hardware acceleration inside the arrays speeds up copying of data which ultimately reduces exposure to risk during migrations. This is a Version 1 attribute – not a bolt-on later on.

Further Resources: 

Here are some other useful VVol resources created by HDS related to VVol :

• Part 1 of the series
• Part 2 of the series
• My last post of VVOL regarding caution in implementation and use
• Detailed list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• Link to HDS VVol homepage where further information will be collated

More to Come ……

 

 

 308 total views,  1 views today