A New Era for Virtualization Team and Storage Team Collaboration

At the beginning of the server virtualization era, it was very simple: Roles of storage teams and server virtualization teams were clear to each. The virtualization team asked for a specific storage capacity for specific purpose/workload and that’s all. The storage team created the LUNs or NFS file systems and gave it to the virtualization team.

Today, these two teams face a much more complex situation. New technologies and features emerged on both the storage side and the virtualization side—such as Storage Distributed Resource Scheduling (SDRS), VStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI), Storage I/O Control (SIOC), Thin Provisioning, Snapshots, and Clones.

With these new technologies and features in the mix, what are the exact roles of the server virtualization team and the storage team? Clearly, interaction and collaboration between those teams should be much tighter.

Questions arise, such as: Should storage be thin provisioned on the virtualization level or on the storage level? Should SIOC be used? Should VAAI be implemented? Which team should be responsible for clones and snapshots?

In this Knowledge Sharing article, Moshe Karabelnik discusses the relevant technologies and features involved, explains the collaboration between the storage team and the server virtualization team regarding each technology or feature, and suggests tasks for each team regarding those technologies while constructing the infrastructure for the first time as well as on a regular basis.

Moshe then goes on to suggest a methodology that will give a clear view for each team of its relevant tasks.

This article will be of interest to storage or server virtualization team members that would like to enhance collaboration to fully utilize the systems under their responsibility. While this article will focus on the technologies and features especially related to EMC VNX storage systems and VMware vSphere server virtualization environments, experienced IT professionals could adopt it for any other technology as well.

Read the full article.