How To Increase Application Availability for VMware and Hyper-V

Server virtualization is growing at over 100% per year according to a recent IDC report. Everyone knows the obvious benefits:

• server virtualization improves IT management
• reduces expenses, and
• improves server utilization
• helps you “go green” by saving electricity

But here is the main reason why everyone likes server virtualization – it allows you to increase application and data availability. Ensuring that servers are continuously operating even in the event of failure or disaster or even a human error is the key driver of virtualization initiatives in IT departments around the world.

At the foundation of each successful vSphere or Hyper-V implementation is networked storage or “shared storage” (i.e. SAN). It’s required to enable IT administrators to provision virtual machines and to move them between physical hosts for workload balancing and to restart unresponsive VMs from a functional host in the case of system failure which essentially makes “high availability” possible.

Traditionally, network storage has been too expensive to buy and too complex to manage for anyone aside from big companies with large IT budgets. But using SAN software created a paradigm shift. With SAN software, you can easily and inexpensively turn a industry-standard Intel or AMD server into shared storage to transfer storage data from your VMware vSphere or Hyper-V servers to the centralized storage. This SAN software technology works like the typical “firmware” inside a high-end storage appliance but just without the actual metal box that comes pre-packaged in a UPS Ground box. Instead, you just get the SAN software and run it on any powerful server, for instance with 8TB of hard disk drives inside, and with a flip of that proverbial switch, you have a fully-functional SAN that is highly reliable and highly available, robust, powerful and easy to install and manage.

In the past ten years, various companies began developing “SAN software” which would alleviate the pains of purchasing complex, proprietary and very expensive SAN products from traditional, big-name vendors. This SAN software is used to build shared storage appliances for VMware ESX and vSphere as well as Hyper-V and the combination of shared storage built with SAN software and virtualized IT creates a powerful infrastructure that is highly available, fault-tolerant and easy to protect and manage. There is proven synergy with thousands of users all over the world who build shared storage with SAN software.

Here is the short list of benefits of using SAN Software to build highly available storage out of standard Intel-architecture servers for use with VMware and Hyper-V:

• Transform a standard, Intel-architecture server into a fault-tolerant SAN with High Availability
• Build your own shared storage to take advantage of Live Migration with Hyper-V or VMotion and VMware HA with VMware vSphere
• Build a high-end SAN without the high costs associated with proprietary vendor products
• Ensure Business Continuity with Synchronous Mirroring, Remote Replication and CDP/Snapshots of the virtual machines

To realize full benefits of server virtualization, your environment must have a SAN because some of the key features do not work without a shared storage on your network.