HP Storage
Solutions
for VMware
Virtualization
Brochure
I. Virtualization is changing the world
To help reduce costs and increase efficiency, availability, and flexibility of their IT organizations, businesses of all sizes are turning to virtualization. VMware vSphere is an industry-leading virtualization platform that, when combined with flexible server, storage, and networking technologies from HP, can create a powerful and dynamic data center that serves as the platform for private and public clouds. To maximize the benefits offered by VMware virtualization, you need to start with the right storage foundation—one that can deliver the availability, efficiency, manageability, and performance required by virtual server, desktop, and private cloud environments.
Yesterday’s solutions won’t solve tomorrow’s problems. With HP Storage for VMware solutions, you have a powerful and flexible infrastructure that stores, protects, and manages your virtual servers and desktops. As part of the HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Storage solutions integrate with HP servers, networking, and software to deliver a new level of agility and efficiency.
II. Virtualization environment challenges
The shared nature of resources in a virtual environment dictates specific capabilities that storage must deliver to serve as a solid foundation. These capabilities include:
• Performance – When virtual machines (VMs) are consolidated, they squeeze storage performance as the array becomes the focal point as many vSphere hosts are needed simultaneously. Workloads in a virtualized environment are unpredictable with random and frequently occurring I/O. As a result, storage must be resilient enough to handle numerous hosts and must fully support mixed workloads.
• Availability – VMs are only as available as the storage they reside on. Storage in vSphere environments must be protected at many levels including disks, controllers, and nodes to ensure survival— and not cause disruptions—should potential failures occur. • Simplicity – Virtualization introduces complexity into the data
center, with particular complexity directly impacting storage. Storage must be as simple to manage and maintain as possible and not add unnecessary complexity to the vSphere environment. • Efficiency – Storage capital expenditures often detract from
the savings of implementing virtualization. Organizations have historically bought more storage when they run into capacity or performance barriers. Storage needs to be optimized for virtualized environments to maximize efficiency so that capacity and performance barriers do not create additional expenses.
Most storage today is unable to keep up with the demands of server and client virtualization. As a result, deploying VMware vSphere incorrectly can be challenging and cost-prohibitive, therefore detracting from the core benefits offered by VMware virtualization solutions. HP is uniquely positioned to deliver storage that meets the requirements of virtualized environments. HP Converged Storage products such as the LeftHand and 3PAR Storage arrays serve as a solid foundation for building demanding virtualized environments, along with HP StoreOnce Backup Systems for protection.
III. HP and VMware partnership: delivering
a more agile and efficient IT environment
For nearly 10 years HP and VMware have worked together to deliver on the promise of virtualization and to create a more cost-effective, agile, and efficient IT infrastructure. As strategic partners, HP and VMware collaborate across storage, servers, networking, security, software, and services to offer solutions for VMware vSphere built on HP’s proven, Converged Infrastructure. HP and VMware work together on projects that include certification, integration, new technology development, reference architectures, and best practice guides. In addition, as both a VMware Global Technology Alliance Partner and the industry’s leading original equipment manufacturer of VMware software, HP offers more VMware solution expertise than any other VMware partner:
• HP offers more VMware-certified storage and server models than any other vendor.
• HP Technology and Enterprise Services have more than 1200 VMware certified professionals.
• HP is an official VMware Global System Integrator/System Outsourcer Partner and a VMware Premier Enterprise Partner. • HP Education Services is one of the largest global VMware
Authorized Training Centers.
• HP Technology Services has been an authorized VMware service partner since 2003.
All HP shared storage products are qualified and listed in the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide and the Storage Virtual Appliance program. Through HP’s industry-leading partnership with VMware, HP Storage offers advanced integration across VMware’s storage initiatives, ranging from vCenter Server, to vSphere Storage application programming interface (APIs), to vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM). In addition, to improve your overall experience after deployment, you can purchase VMware software from HP with HP support—giving you one source of support for your servers, storage, networking, and virtualization software.
IV. Enhance your VMware virtualization
environment with HP storage
The requirements for what storage must deliver in a virtualized environment are clear. Imagine what you can achieve by combining the power of VMware vSphere with storage platforms designed to eliminate the challenges of server and client virtualization. Fortunately, you don’t have to imagine it. HP’s next generation of
With HP Storage supporting your VMware deployments you are able to:
• Optimize VM density, availability, and business continuity (BC) • Simplify provisioning and management with less storage and
vSphere complexity
• Save on storage costs through better capacity utilization and efficiencies
Optimize
availability and
performance
Simplify
provisioning and
management
Save
on storage costs
Small to
mid-sized business
Enterprise and
service provider
Backup
and
recovery
LeftHand
3PAR
StoreOnce
• Network RAID • Multi-Site SAN • Peer motion data mobility
• Wide-striping • Mixed workload support • VMware VAAI support
• Autonomic restart • Built-in hardware redundancy • Backup speeds up to 28 TB/hour
• Consolidated management interface
• Centralized backup of remote sites • Leading backup application integration • Autonomic groups • vCenter Management plug-in
• vSphere Storage API and SRM integration • Application Aware Snapshot Manager • vCenter
Management plug-in
• vSphere Storage API and SRM integration
• All-inclusive SAN software suite • Thin provisioning • Pay as you grow w/ clustered nodes
• Thin Provisioning, conversion, and persistence • Automatic zero detect
• Adaptive optimization
• Pay as you grow scalability • Couplet based licensing • De-duplication reduces backup data up to 20x
VM Density with vSphere using legacy storage
VM Density with vSphere using 3PAR Storage
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V. Using HP storage to overcome
virtualization challenges
From small businesses to large enterprises, HP storage offers a wide range of solutions to extend the value of your specific VMware environment. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to virtualization and HP can deliver a storage solution that meets your needs and requirements.
HP LeftHand Storage, optimized for small to mid-sized businesses deploying VMware virtual server and desktop environments, is based on a clustered storage architecture that eliminates single points of failure and scales-out non-disruptively in capacity and performance. Built on industry-standard HP ProLiant and BladeSystem hardware, and using HP scale-out software and converged management, the HP LeftHand portfolio offers affordable enterprise functionality—with an all-inclusive feature set and a pay-as-you grow model—for small to mid-sized businesses. HP 3PAR Storage, the next generation of Tier 1 storage for
virtualized enterprise and service provider environments, combines autonomically managed and dynamically tiered storage arrays with advanced internal virtualization capabilities to increase administrative efficiency, system utilization, and storage performance. By enabling the consolidation of multiple workloads while simultaneously reducing operational costs on a modern architecture, HP 3PAR Storage is designed specifically for the unpredictable demands of virtualization, the cloud, and IT-as-a-Service.
and recovery of virtual environments—to unique areas like service level agreements, recovery time objectives, and recovery point objectives. The rapid growth of VMs creates a lot of data and most of this data is not unique. HP StoreOnce Backup systems, with local deduplication to reduce storage and bandwidth needs, integrate seamlessly into your VMware environment; expanding as backup requirements grow.
VI. Challenge: eliminating performance
bottlenecks that limit VM density
HP Solution: Optimize and increase VM density through unique HP storage performance features.
To maximize the return on investment (ROI) and benefits that virtualization provides, you need to increase efficiency and drive VM density as high as possible. High VM density helps dramatically lower virtual infrastructure acquisition and operational costs. Storage often becomes the limiting factor to achieving higher VM density as it is a single resource that is shared across all the hosts in the environment. Therefore, selecting storage that is designed to handle the unique demands of virtualized environments is critical to achieving your desired growth and levels of consolidation.
HP 3PAR Storage eliminates the barriers to increased VM density that you encounter with traditional storage arrays. The HP 3PAR Mesh Active architecture and wide striping capabilities allow you to double
Low-latency link
VMware highly available server infrastructure
HP LeftHand Multi-site SAN
VMware vSphere VMware vSphere VMware vSphere VMware vSphere
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Single volumes “stretched” across locations HP LeftHand Multi-Site SAN
VMware vSphere VMware vSphere VMware vSphere VMware vSphere
HP LeftHand Storage has a clustered node architecture that enables non-disruptive scaling of performance and capacity. Unlike traditional storage area network (SAN) storage architectures, LeftHand nodes scale capacity and performance linearly to seamlessly grow with your business. All LeftHand Storage clusters are pre-optimized to balance performance and capacity resources within the node so that customers can start with what they need today and easily grow by adding storage nodes to their clusters without taking systems offline.
VII. Challenge: improve availability and
business continuity
HP Solution: Optimize application availability and data protection by ensuring always-on and protected VMs.
Virtualization provides many benefits, but there is also a certain level of risk that virtualization brings to the data center. Hardware failures in virtual environments, due to their consolidated nature,
multiple copies of data across a cluster of storage nodes, eliminating any single point of failure. The HP LeftHand Multi-Site SAN, certified with vSphere, provides users with the ability to assign storage nodes in the cluster to different sites across racks, rooms, buildings, and cities. Based on this assignment, the software automatically makes the appropriate configuration and operational decisions to protect data from site failure. This can be utilized in conjunction with the vSphere HA and FT features to provide high or continuous availability across sites separated by distances.
The Peer Motion feature available on both 3PAR and LeftHand arrays provides data mobility so data can be migrated from one cluster to another without disruption to applications and without taking systems offline. Peer Motion compliments VMware Storage vMotion by offloading the migration of clusters to the array, therefore eliminating the burden placed on server and network resources. Disaster recovery and BC demands that virtual environments be protected beyond local failures and many companies must extend
Virtualization requires re-thinking the backup environment. Industry leading backup applications, combined with the multi-platform support and solution flexibility of HP StoreOnce, provide superior value to VM-intensive environments. HP StoreOnce provides VM-specific benefits such as improved de-duplication and smooth VMware integration.
VIII. Challenge: costs associated with
storage growth and inefficiencies
HP Solution: Save costs through improved storage utilization and efficienciesTo achieve maximum virtualization ROI, reducing both capital expenses and operational costs is important. Storage is often the most costly part of a virtual environment so being able to drive down the cost of storage will help minimize your upfront costs and maximize your long term savings. Often, because of inefficiencies with traditional storage arrays, more storage is purchased than is necessary to meet capacity and/or performance requirements of virtual environments. Most virtual environments tend to have rapid growth due to the ease of deploying new VMs which can quickly consume limited storage resources. Having storage that is both efficient and easy to non-disruptively scale to meet future growth needs is important.
HP 3PAR thin technologies allow you to reduce your capacity requirements by breaking the traditional link between allocated and purchased capacity. HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning software enables you to allocate as much logical capacity to a VMFS volume as needed without dedicating any physical capacity up front. This translates into less capacity to purchase up front and less power and cooling costs over the long term, which eliminates waste. HP 3PAR Thin Conversion software provides you with the ability to get thin by converting fully-provisioned “fat” volumes from other storage platforms into more efficient thin volumes, which allows you to purchase up to 50% less capacity. HP 3PAR Thin Persistence helps you stay thin as your data demands change. HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization Software provides a granular, policy-driven, autonomic storage tiering solution that delivers service level optimization at the lowest possible cost while increasing agility and minimizing risk. HP LeftHand Storage allows you to pay-as-you-grow so you can scale capacity and performance as needed. Unlike traditional SAN storage architectures, LeftHand SANs scale capacity and performance linearly to seamlessly grow with your business and don’t require systems to go offline. LeftHand SAN also offers reservation-less thin provisioning, meaning that the system’s capacity is only dedicated as you write to the volume. Thin provisioning efficiencies underlie every HP LeftHand SAN function including snapshots, remote copy, volume migration, and asynchronous replication, providing excellent capacity utilization with the potential for significant storage cost savings. The all-inclusive management suite included with HP LeftHand solutions delivers an array of value-added tools required to integrate your LeftHand Storage with your VMware environment. This eliminates the need to purchase additional software and services to get your solution
HP StoreOnce drives backup costs down by eliminating redundant data that exists in your virtual environment. VMs have a lot of similar data since they typically run the same operating systems and applications. Backing-up and storing all that redundant data gets very expensive over time. The de-duplication that HP StoreOnce provides optimizes your backup storage capacity by identifying and eliminating redundant data which allows more data to be stored on the same disk footprint. HP StoreOnce can provide up to a 20x reduction of backup data in vSphere environments to drastically reduce the amount of duplicate data. This translates into big savings as it lowers disk capacity requirements and all the associated operational expenses.
IX. Challenge: complexity in deploying
and managing storage within your
VMware environment
HP Solution: Streamline and simplify storage deployment and management
The dynamic nature of virtualized environments can create havoc with most storage systems. The mapping and visibility of storage through multiple layers and components (VMs, hosts, logical unit number devices, switches, host bus adapter’s, etc.) creates management complexity. In addition, VMs are always on the move, both from host to host, and from storage device to storage device, which can make management even more complex. Even in environments that have dedicated SAN administrators, storage can be difficult to manage on both sides as there is no visibility between virtual storage assets and physical storage assets. As a result, management integration is a must in order to simplify operational tasks and to eliminate the added complexity of a vSphere environment.
HP 3PAR Storage can reduce provisioning and management by up to 90% through autonomic management features such as HP 3PAR Autonomic Groups, which eliminates tedious manual repetition of commands when provisioning storage to VMware host clusters. HP LeftHand Storage is designed to be simple to get up and running quickly. From out of the box, to rack and stack, and on through the software setup wizard you can have volumes configured and ready to use. The management console for LeftHand Storage allows you to centrally manage all of your LeftHand nodes to help ease you through the installation and configuration process.
For integrated management, HP offers a single plug-in so you can manage and monitor every part of your physical environment inside of vCenter Server. The Insight Control plug-in for vCenter Server allows you to manage physical servers, storage, and networking assets from a single tab inside of vCenter Server. The HP Insight Control Storage Module plug-in works with the LeftHand and 3PAR
information such as component health, RAID levels, drive types, and volume types are displayed within vCenter Server which helps reduce administration time and improves clarity between the virtual and physical layers.
To provide even more integration between vCenter Server and storage
X. HP storage services for virtualization
HP offers a comprehensive range of services to assess, design, implement, and manage your VMware environment. From strategy and planning, through migration and modernization, HP experts ensure that you can bridge business and technology to gain full value from your storage investments. HP has over 20 years of experience in designing and implementing storage solutions. Now we meld server virtualization with storage virtualization for an end-to-end solution. Services HP offers that will help you with your VMware environment include:
• Storage Modernization for Virtualized Environments –
This provides alternative reference architectures that integrate new technology with existing infrastructure and defines the envisioned target storage environment based on a proven solution design methodology.
• Data Migration Services - HP will discover your source data and help you model a target environment, assess data quality and infrastructure remediation, and design a migration plan that achieves your migration goals. We will test and build the process, then run the migration so your data and VMs will be seamlessly migrated to the new environment.
• Storage Preparedness for Cloud - Ensure that your storage infrastructure can support your cloud initiatives. HP will assess your readiness by reviewing the technologies you have in place to deliver cloud services and match recommended data locations to service-level requirements. You’ll get a practical reference architecture as well as a detailed business case and cost justification.
• Backup/Recovery Modernization - Optimize your backup/recovery solution to meet the needs of your VMware environment. Practical deliverables include reference architecture, cost analysis, and justification for any new hardware or software needed.
XI. Summary
HP Converged Storage are next-generation storage systems designed to deliver high-performance, HA, efficient storage utilization, and simplified management for virtual server and client environments. HP Converged Storage will help you optimize, simplify and reduce costs in your VMware deployments.
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