Virtual Environments and Clusters - Key Metrics for Effective Storage Performance and Capacity Reporting (6 of 10)

Managing storage in clustered and/or virtual environments can be challenging because it is shared among all hosts and virtual machines running on it. 

Below is an example of a VMware cluster, just a simple 3 node cluster going to some shared storage.

Features that are available

•          Thin provisioning

•          Storage can be viewed at many levels.

•          Could be different tiers allocated to the same cluster

•          Overhead at various points

gives you a good indication of your overhead.

Storage Virtualization

There are advantages to the layered system

•       It allows a caching layer so that you may not have to go all the way to the backend to satisfy an I/O request

•       There are a lot of administrator features regarding allocation and replication, pooling physical storage from multiple sources into logical groupings is useful

•          Can be a centralized source for collecting data

•          If using as a data source beware of double counting with backend

There are a wide variety of techniques for virtualizing storage, be aware of the implications for data collection and reporting.

On Monday I’ll be discussing response impacts on performance capacity and metrics for these. 
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Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant