VMware Communities > Blogs > Sathish Murthy's Blog > Tags

Blog Posts

Sathish Murthy's Blog

2 Posts tagged with the netapp tag
0

Deduplication on VMware

Posted by smurthy Jan 11, 2009

Typical Scenario:

I want to have 4 ESX systems with 4 identical Virtual Machines each. All the virtual machines
share a common data store and each virtual machine has been assigned a disk space
of 100 GB. The environment is managed by virtual center.
Total number of VM's = 4VMs x 4ESX = 16 VMs.
Total number of disk space consumed = 16 x 100GB = 1600GB or ~ 1.6 TB.

Is everything fine so far?
How about cutting down on space used to 800 GB or less?

With NetApp built-in deduplication technology on storage you can reduce the space consumed by VMware
virtual machines by 50% or more. NetApp dedupe technology eliminates duplicate data at a block level.
Hence there is no significant performance impact to the production virtual machines while running dedupe.
Also deduplication can be scheduled per volume even at a later time. Imagine your scenario where you have
identical say Windows virtual machines. 16 copies of "C:\Program Files" are almost identical even at a file
level. NetApp dedupe runs at a block level and hence the factor of dedupe is very high.

VMware before dedupe

http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/4963/VMware_b4_dedupe.JPG

VMware after dedupe on NetApp

http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/4964/VMware_af_dedupe.JPG

ESX supports three protocols namely FC, NFS and ISCSI for the datastore. All the three protocols are supported
by any NetApp Unified storage system and dedupe works on all the three protocol data sets.

True benefits of VMware deduplication on NetApp storage

1. Save Storage Space by 50% or more
2. Save costs and reduce your datacenter footprints
3. Move closer towards a greener datacenter plan
4. Reduce network bandwidth with less data blocks to replicate to Disaster Recovery site
5. Dedupe factor more than 90% for backup/archive data


For all these benefits NetApp deduplication is built-in feature and freely available to use on all systems.

Read more on the NetApp 50% space savings program for VMware at

http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/infrastructure/virtualization/guarantee.html
http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/infrastructure/virtualization/vmware.html

Let me know your inputs and comments

0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: deduplication, netapp, esx, space_savings, go_green, efficient, best_of_the_week, storage, 50%_guarantee
2

VMWare ESX backups in Seconds

Posted by smurthy Jan 3, 2009

Happy New Year 2009!

If you have New Year resolutions as below

  • Going home after work and never get a call until next day morning
  • Doing more with less resources in the datacenter
  • Cutting costs and get immediate return of investment
  • Making your company ahead of its competition
  • Building Dynamic Datacenter with VMware virtualization

Virtualizing servers are just half the battle. The rest of the half is achieved by having a Virtualized shared storage.

By virtualizing servers you cut down costs, consolidate servers, reduce floorspace, reduce power and power requirements and increase your server efficiency and resources. After consolidating to a VM infrastructure you end up having longer backup and recovery windows, inefficient usage of space etc..

With any NetApp array in the backend, you do get many advantages like

  • Production Inbuilt (Free) Deduplication for VMware Datastore saving upto 80% space
  • Multiprotocol support on Unified NetApp Storage (Fibre Channel, NFS, iSCSI) for VM datastore
  • Thin Provisioning
  • Flexible volumes for High performance and to increase/decrease VM datastore on the fly.
  • Instantaneous Backup and Restores using NetApp snapshots (SMVI integration)
  • Robust Disaster recovery with integration of NetApp snapmirror with VMware Site Recovery Manager

The most significant of all is Instantaneous Backup/Restore using NetApp snapshots. The Entire VM farm can be backup full/selectively upto a datastore in few seconds using NetApp Snapshots. NetApp snapshots uses pointer based technology that does not cause any performance impact to the VMware environment. For every VMware datastore, the NetApp array can support 255 copies of instantaneous backups with just 20% overhead in space.

The NetApp Snapshot Backup/Restore technology integration with VMware is done by a product named SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure (SMVI). SMVI allows VMware administrators to schedule instantaneous backups on VMware ESX farm, define the backup policy, retention policy and alerts. SMVI is a GUI based backup suite that perfectly integrates VMware ESX backups with NetApp snapshot technology. All the backups taken using SMVI are completely consistent and are easily recoverable using SMVI GUI in matter of Minutes.

SMVI Advantages

  • Data protection of VMware VI environment
  • Ability to take consistent backup of virtual machines
  • Ability to restore virtual machines & datastores
  • Ability to schedule backups to match backup requirements
  • Ability to set retention policies for backups
  • Ability to Mirror the backup to remote site with SnapMirror
  • Complements VMware's Site Recovery Manager
  • Backup & restore of VMs via SMVI
  • Site failover via SRM

With NetApp SMVI, Your New Year resolutions will Never fail.

2 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: esx, backup, vcb, netapp, smvi, snapshots, restore, deduplication, thin, provisioning, disaster, recovery, best_of_the_week, data, center, dynamic, data, center
Click to view smurthy's profile

smurthy

 Member since: Nov 27, 2007

This blog focuses on virtualization trends in ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).

View smurthy's profile

Archives