NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

Everything Old is New Again

I’ve been saying ‘everything which is old is new again’ over the past few years as it is very evident within the server virtualization landscape. Well low and behold Google announces plans to develop their browser, Google Chrome, into its own operating system and I believe the same phrase applies.

I vividly recall my second job in the IT industry, when I was at a regional Internet Service Provider. 'Back in those days' the big news were the plans of Netscape to release a Java based operating system delivered via Netscape Navigator.

I’m a huge fan of Google and I hope they can pull this off. I wonder how much of what was learned in developing Android will be leveraged in the new OS.

You know what would really impress me? What if Google got into the server virtualization business – now that would be cool! Hey they're already in the cloud...

VMware Co-Brands TR-3428

There's an update to our VI3 storage best practices technical report. There's no technical content updates to be concerned with, instead I would like to share that TR-3428 version 4.5.2 has been officially co-branded by VMware.

This update is basically a quality assurance seal which states that the engineering teams at VMware and NetApp have reviewed and verified the contents of this technical report and the recommendations included within are truly best practices.

This wasn't always the case as some of the content in TR-3428 were truly ground breaking not too long ago. For example the dual VMkernel network designs had on occasion lead to additional discussions and configuration validations prior to implementation.

Kudos to all involved, now I think we've come to a time to let this document rest and focus on the vSphere TR.

Storage 101 – Virtualization Changes Everything

Welcome all to Storage 101, I’ll be brief below is our syllabus and the topics we will cover leading up to VMworld. The format of these posts will begin with a high level introduction to the technology followed by all of the technical gory details. I am hoping that those who want the ‘why’ can be satisfied up front, and these who want the ‘how’ can continue reading.

The Epiphany - I Had One, You Want One?

Recently I was visiting customers and prospects in the North East and during one of our meetings the customer stated, “…what NetApp is doing, in terms of storage virtualization, make us feel like NetApp is much more aligned with the goals of VMware than their parent company…”

This praise was shared while the customer told us how EMC is working to earn back their VMware (storage) business. Apparently the EMC team stating something to the effect that more companies run VMware on EMC than on any other storage platform and that the numbers from these surveys validated this claim.

The customer shared with us that what was very interesting in this data set was that NetApp's gains in market share was much more impressive than EMC's legacy market share.

NetApp: Microsoft’s Storage Solutions Partner of the Year

I apologize as I’ve been traveling today which has led to a delay in getting this post posted. Hopefully you’ve heard today's news that NetApp was announced as Microsoft’s Advanced Infrastructure Storage Solutions Partner for 2009. I’d like to extend congratulations to the Microsoft and NetApp teams for earning this recognition.

What’s the right LUN size for a VMFS datastore?

I can’t tell you how often we are asked this question and the answer has many variables including the amount of aggregated I/O of the servers being virtualized onto the datastore, the storage protocol used in connecting to the datastore, etc.

Vote for the Top 5 VMware Blogs

Eric Siebert has asked the VMware community to make their voices by submitting their votes in a survey of the top 5 VMware related blogs. If you’re a reader of this blog and you haven’t casted a vote please head over to vSphere-Land and do so, it will only take a minute.

Got an iPhone? Got VMware? Heard of VManage?

Taking a break from the serious posts and stumbling thru the web when low and behold I learn of VManage, which is as far as I know, the first VMware management tool for the iPhone.

I’m sure from the blog posts its easy to tell I’m a bit of a VMware fan; however, my affection for my iPhone may not be as clear. Let’s just say I have a 3GS on preorder waiting to be picked up tomorrow at 8:00 AM EST.

I/O Efficiency and Alignment – the Cloud Demands Standards

I was surprised to read in the relatively recent EMC report: VMware ESX Server Optimization with EMC® Celerra® Performance Study that when it comes to aligning the partitions inside of virtual machines EMC has diametrically opposed recommendations based on the storage protocol and storage array which one deploys with VMware. I have to say that such recommendations raise a red flag that I believe needs some additional light shed on it.

VI3 on NetApp Best Practices Update

Today we've published a minor update to our VMware on NetApp: Storage Best Practices Technical Report TR-3428. After posting the blog announcing version 4.4 I received a number of comments and emails asking to share and comment as we publish future updates, so without further adieu here's the highlights of version 4.5.1...

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware

We were quite a bit surprised to see how popular our “Multivendor iSCSI” post was. The feedback was overwhelming and very supportive of industry leaders partnering to ensure customer’s success with VMware. While writing that post, we (Vaughn Stewart from NetApp and Chad Sakac from EMC) discussed following up the iSCSI post with one focused on deploying VMware over NFS. The most difficult part around creating this post is that we couldn’t do it with our iSCSI-focused colleagues.

Since the original post, we’ve been busy assisting our customers and partners. We apologize for the delay, so without further ado we present to you the followup: a “Multivendor NFS” post for our joint customers. One of the goals of this post is to dispel the FUD customers often hear around NFS. Heck, if EMC and NetApp can agree – then you KNOW this post is FUD-Free!

Join Rick Scherer on today’s TechTalk: Virtualizing SQL

Today, May 28, 2009 at 11:00am Pacific Time you have an opportunity to join Rick Scherer of VMwaretips.com and a fellow vExpert for a discussion on how the San Diego Data Processing Corporation overcame server sprawl by successfully implementing SQL Server® on VMware®.

In addition to Rick, experts from NetApp and VMware will host an interactive discussion on best practices that will help you weigh your deployment options.

Topics for today’s call include:

* What You Should Know and How to Get Started
* Gain performance advantages when virtualizing SQL
* Optimize storage utilization without impacting performance
* Implement centralized and cost-effective backup and disaster recovery

You can register for the call here

Enjoy the TechTalk. Rick really knows his stuff and has an enormous amount of valuable information to share.

VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast #48

Yesterday Chris Gebhardt and I had the privilege of being guests of John Troyer on episode 48 of the VMware Communities Podcast. On the podcast we discussed numerous topics regarding storage with VMware including Multipathing, performance, storage virtualization, DR, and backup and recovery.

vSphere Introduces the Plug-n-Play SAN

With today’s release of vSphere, VMware has introduced numerous new features and technologies all designed to advance the virtual evolution of our data centers. With this release VMware and their storage alliance partners have delivered Plug-n-Play SAN storage connectivity. As you begin downloading the final bits, refreshing your labs and planning your upgrade path to vSphere I’d like to dig into the considerations of and how one can deploy a robust, reliable, and greatly simplified P-n-P SAN architecture with vSphere and NetApp.

Site Recovery Manager: It’s Not Just for VMs

A key goal at NetApp is advancing the value of storage in the virtual data center from the traditional model of highly available storage to a more advanced virtual object oriented model. This approach is unified in nature as it provides the traditional functions of high availability, high performance, and the traditional storage provisioning of LUNs and file shares while also expanding into the realm of management of virtualized objects by the virtualization administrative team.

By virtualized objects I am specifically speaking of the objects that a VMware admin care about such as VMs, Datastores, workflow automation tools such SRM or View Manager, etc. For this blog I’d like to share with you an example of the direction NetApp is taking storage virtualization by discussing how to integrate a NetApp NAS file server into a VMware SRM recovery plan.