Maybe the Best VMware Datastore and Storage Strategies Around?

Do you have the right VMware datastore strategy in place for vSphere storage?

Vaughn Stewart and Michael Slisinger have shared their VMware datastore and storage strategies in a book called, Virtualization Changes Everything: Storage Strategies for VMware vSphere and Cloud Computing and here’s my review.

The Review…

First of all, Vaughn and Michael do a superb job writing this book and aside from the sometimes hard-to-understand technical language; I felt the book covers all the ins and outs of virtualization storage.

It’s a wealth of technical information that ranges from creating the basic VMware datastore all the way to the nuts and bolts of desinging a high performance shared storage platform.

The book discusses how they view storage as a vital piece in the support of virtualization and cloud computing – and how storage architecture is dynamically evolving.

On this point, I completely agree because – I too – have experienced these changes first hand over the last five years, especially with the invent of the VMware datastore.

They also share their view how storage is often overlooked as an important component of the data center and then later realized after the problems begin.

Vaughn and Michael point out the “obvious” that is sometimes ignored; without storage there is no data, and without data, there is no cloud. This point is well made, and once again I agree.

In my own experience, my team and I have spent many tireless hours working with the storage team to re-engineer the way the SAN was carved out at the disk level with an incorrect amount of disk spindles to provide enough performance, as well as fixing LUNs that were provisioned too small. Both cases impacted the VMware datastore.

One storage problem I had to work through was a storage admin who was making 6 drive – disk parody groups, and then carving them back into 56GB LUNs, and then joining 6 LUNs into a LUCE (extent) to make a 300GB LUN. This was insane and I couldn’t get him to stop doing this!

Virtualization Changes Everything!

In Virtualization Changes Everything, Vaughn Stewart and Mike Slisinger, examine storage and break it down into easy to consume key topics.

They look at how the VMware datastore, hypervisor host, virtualization technology and cloud computing have all played an almost evolutionary role in changing things.

Below are screenshots of the topics they write about, my favorite is chapter 5.

Samples of the Table of Contents:

vmware datastore

ToC Sample 2

This screenshot of the table of contents shows some very important topics that every storage engineer should know.

vmware datastore

The topics covered in chapter 5 are my favorites:

vmware datastore

A New Way of Managing Storage

Vaughn and Michael explain why breaking up outdated storage silos into a dynamic, flexible hosting environment, is a better storage design.

Take note! This is a key factor for anyone starting off as a storage administrator.

Addressing Common Storage Goals and Challenges

Virtualization Changes Everything goes into further detail and reviews common goals and challenges associated with providing storage services for cloud computing.

I’ve been there and understand the complexity of adding, expanding, removing storage on a server built in the cloud – it can be tricky!

Vaughn and Michael address each topic and dive deep into advanced storage technologies designed to scale and support the ever changing, and ever expanding, storage needs of the future.

Who Should Read this Book?

The examples in Virtualization Changes Everything are pulled from Vaughn and Michael real-world experiences, and often overlap and integrate with other complicated technologies.

I admit, there is almost too much information in Virtualization Changes Everything about storage, but it is a perfect guide book for the storage engineer who needs to update his/her storage strategies, or for the new storage administrator who is just getting started.

And finally, for any manager or person that wants to understand what’s going on with storage…

As a seasoned vitalization professional, I did learn quite a few new things about storage that I thought could be of importance on high availability, efficiency, integration and performance that will help when architecting the best storage infrastructure for the cloud.

I recommend this book! Get your copy of Virtualization Changes Everything on Amazon.