VMware for IBMC Draft
VMware for IBM Cloud and QuantaStor
Server and desktop virtualization environments require highly-available block and file storage that can deliver consistent performance with minimal downtime. QuantaStor storage solutions built on IBM Bare Metal hardware provide VMware certified NFS and VAAI-integrated iSCSI storage. VMware VAAI greatly improves the performance of VM cloning and other network-intensive operations, while Automatic Snapshot Schedules with long term retention options make it easy to protect and recover data and virtual machines from previous points in time.
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Key Features
- VMware VAAI Integrated with VMware 5 and 6 Certification certifications
- Hybrid-SSD and All-Flash configurations for high IOPS performance
- Storage Grid Technology
- Remote Replication
- Encryption
- Compression
- Snapshots
- Cloning
- Thin provisioning
are designed with high-availability and scale-out features needed for mission-critical desktop and server virtualization solutions. All highly-available configurations use a shared SAS/Fibre Channel (FC) storage back-end connected via 12G SAS to an external disk enclosure but can also be FC connected to a back-end SAN.
Remote Replication
To ensure high availability in the event of a hardware outage it is recommended that one replicate VMware datastores to a second QuantaStor system in the same or remote IBM data center. QuantaStor's unique grid technology makes this easy to manage, a QuantaStor grid that spans IBM data centers can be managed from a single web interface allowing data replication to and from any system in the grid. Replication is block-level incremental, asynchronous, and may be configured to run at certain times of day or every few minutes to meet strong SLA requirements.
Hybrid-Flash and All-Flash Accelerated Storage
QuantaStor's versatile configuration options help to deliver VMware-ready storage across a range of performance requirements. The QS Hybrid for VMware reference configuration untilizes SSD to accelerate write performance and a RAM-based read cache that will produce between 10K and 15K read/write IOPS (70/30). For VMware storage requiring performance in excess of 30K IOPS, OSNEXUS recommends dividing the VM hosts across multiple SSD and RAM-accelerated QuantaStor storage servers.
When performance in excess of 30K IOPS in a single storage pool is required, users should deploy All-Flash storage system that can deliver performance from 30K to 1M+ IOPS, depending on the number and type of SSDs used in the deployment.
Virtualized Database and OLTP Applications
QuantaStor SDS High Availability (HA) configurations are ideal for the heavy IOPS workloads seen with databases and OLTP applications that run within a virtualized environment. QuantaStor’s integrated ZFS technology combined with QuantaStor’s integrated HA cluster and failover management technology ensures that applications always have access to their storage even in the event of a switch outage, head-node outage or a back-end enclosure outage. Storage pools deliver both file and block storage via all major protocols including NFS, CIFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel so that applications can make use of any given configuration for both structured and unstructured data. QuantaStor’s ZFS-based Storage Pools also provide the broadest set of enterprise storage features including high-availability, data compression, remote-replication, snapshots, thin-provisioning and encryption.
Reference Configurations
SAN/NAS - HYBRID SOLUTIONS
SAN/NAS - ALL-FLASH SOLUTIONS