VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘lefthand’

I’m not a fortune teller and I don’t have a crystal ball, but during my attendance at HP Storage Tech Day I definitely received an impression that the acquisition of Left Hand Networks now plays a key role in future storage offerings at HP. Based on the discussions, presentations, and hands-on-labs I participated in, Left Hand’s storage virtualization model is obviously common strategy among other HP storage products moving forward. I predict a win/win storage scenario is “in the cards” for both HP and it’s customers.

The Left Hand Model
Left Hand Networks established itself with SMB and Mid Market customers by combining storage controllers and disk shelves into one x86 based appliance that serves iSCSI storage to ESX hosts. Linking multiple storage appliances together in a cluster, Left Hand replicates iSCSI volumes across all nodes creating a highly available SAN for virtual hosts. If one node is no longer available the remaining ones seamlessly continue to provide shared storage via the replicated data. Add to this the capability to non disruptively add additional Left Hand appliances, which then enables companies to take advantage of a pay-as-you-grow SAN. Performance improvements and tuning can also be achieved as existing volumes are automatically spread across additional disks provided with each new Left Hand appliance joining the cluster.

The acquisition press release (linked above) provides further insight into HP’s business strategy incorporating Left Hand’s products in it’s portfolio.

“With the addition of LeftHand Networks, HP will add midrange offerings to its suite of iSCSI solutions. Customer needs at the low end of the market will be met with the HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System (AiO) and HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) product lines. The high end will be addressed by the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) line. Customers will further benefit since LeftHand Networks’ solutions are already certified to work with a wide range of HP products, including HP ProLiant servers, HP BladeSystem infrastructure, HP ProCurve Networking and HP Insight Control management software.”

Today HP offers P4000 SAN Solutions with Left Hand technologies.

Server and Storage Convergence
HP’s message from the very beginning of Storage Tech Day was that they intended to converge their server and storage infrastructure offerings. This seems to me to be creating products that by design offer similar scale out capabilities as Read the rest of this entry »

Chad Sakac has a great post on his Virtual Geek blog titled The Case For And Against Stretched ESX Clusters. In this post Chad discusses the possibilities of configuring ESX Clusters between 2 different physical data centers. That is, spanning the SAN across a wide area network so that VMs can be vmotioned between sites. The concept is a frequently discussed desire of many administrators, and Chad brings to light some great points for and against this design with specific configuration details about making it work with VMware ESX.

For example, the post explores several options: Read the rest of this entry »

VMware announced officially today that Site Recovery Manager will be available for order next week and then generally available within 30 days. As I mentioned in my Site Recovery Manager Overview post last week, a requirement to using SRM will be a Site Recovery Agent (SRA) from the various storage vendors. VMware’s announcement reveals what vendors will provide SRAs initially:

“VMware Site Recovery Manager leverages customers’ investment in storage replication software from VMware’s leading storage partners including 3PAR, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, LeftHand Networks and NetApp. VMware is working with partners across its storage partner ecosystem to ensure that customers can use Site Recovery Manager with their storage system and software platform of choice.”

As expected, several reports surfaced on the Internet today Read the rest of this entry »

One of the hands on labs I attended at VMware Partner Exchange was the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) lab. In the lab I was able to get a good understanding of the technical details of how the yet to be released product is configured. The lab then walked us through the fail over process and workflow. This post is a high level summary of what I learned. This post is not intended to be a detailed how to, but instead just a logical overview about what it will take to set up SRM.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post is more of an idea then a report. If you’ve experimented with a design similar to my thoughts below please post a comment and let me know!

Have you tried to configure VMs in a MS cluster across separate ESX hosts? How about clustering a physical server with a VM? VMware’s guide can be found here. Referencing this guide I am specifically talking about “Clustering Virtual Machines Across Physical Hosts (Cluster Across Boxes)” and “Clustering Physical Machines and Virtual Machines (Standby Host)”.

Read the guide and you’ll find there are several prerequisites and restrictions. The most important ones being:

• you must use RDMs in physical mode for shared storage
• dedicate at least 2 physical nics to the VMs
• you can not use multipathing software
• you must use the LSILogic virtual SCSI adapter in your VMs
• you can only use 32 bit VMs. You can not cluster with 64 bit VMs
• iSCSI disks are not supported. NAS disks are not supported.
• you can only use 2 node clustering
• the boot disks for the VMs must be on local storage
• clustered VMs can not participate in an ESX cluster and use VMotion, DRS and HA

So how do we design a clustered VM application that can fully leverage VMotion, DRS, and HA? Read the rest of this entry »

Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware ESX

I’ve been hearing about it all week. The President of my company sent me an email about this at the start of the conference. I finally got to talk to the LeftHand team at their booth today about their new virtual appliance – VSA.

You can download a trial version of VSA here.

Some notes about implementing VSA:

1. you must reserve 1 GB ram for VSA on each ESX host
2. you must reserve 2 GHz cpu for VSA on each ESX host
3. you must create a dedicated Gigabit virtual switch for VSA on each ESX host

After you configure the VSA VMs on each of your local ESX VMFS they are clustered and data is “striped” between all hosts. Then if one host goes down the data is still available to the VMs as they are VMotion-ed or restarted via HA on the other hosts.

The VSA has native ability to do SAN based replication via the WAN.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, I woke up this morning to an email from the President of my company about LeftHand Network’s new virtual appliance. I wrote about this briefly yesterday.

LeftHand Readies “Unique” Virtual SANs

Computerwire

Tim Stammers

September 10, 2007

http://www.computerwire.com/industries/research/?pid=51A3C125%2D40D7%2D40D7%2D823E%2DE4A0FA2EE226

LeftHand Networks claims that it is poised to both halve the cost of providing HA protection for VMware servers, and free stranded disk space in those platforms, by creating a virtual SAN inside VMware ESX clusters.

In the next quarter the company will ship a version of its SAN/iQ clustered and virtualized storage software that can run on a VMware virtual server — delivered as a virtual appliance.

That means that LeftHand will be trailing a raft of other suppliers such as FalconStor and DataCore, which have already ported their storage virtualization software from physical servers to VMware-hosted virtual servers.

Now I am definitely checking this out ASAP!!