Understanding VMware Infrastructure Needs: Save Money

As VMware virtual environments become bigger, the need for storage—and connectivity to storage—increases as well. Understanding the performance needs from your VMware environment and deciding to use either a Fibre Channel switch or Ethernet switch will help you align with financial budgets and save money for the organization.

Generally, Ethernet switches are more popular in data centers, partly due to the fact that they do not require special skills to configure for NFS and iSCSI, unlike FC switches that typically require a more skilled person.

Still, although throughput limits with Ethernet connectivity are acceptable compared to Fibre Channel connectivity, questions remain, including;

• When is the bandwidth provided by a Fibre Channel switch required?

• Should a VMware ESX cluster with test virtual machines (VMs)—which require low bandwidth—actually need to be connected via Fibre Channel?

• Can a VMware cluster be separated between production and testing and connect the test environment via Ethernet?

By analyzing the VM’s performance and cluster requirements together with its service level agreement (SLA), your organization can save thousands of dollars on FC switches and optic cables just by implementing iSCSI or NFS solutions with your VMware environment.

Kobi Shamama’s Knowledge Sharing article will help EMC Proven Professionals decide how to expand their environments by understanding the differences between storage protocols such as NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, including limits and SLA considerations. In addition, the article will guide IT organizations on how to make decisions on data center infrastructure that result in becoming money savers instead of money spenders.

This article describes detailed guidelines for:

• Analyzing performance of VMware environments

• Understanding VMware performance needs

• Understanding SLA needs

• Analyzing Fibre Channel switch and Ethernet switch environments

• Best practices guidelines for successful decision and solution

• Application’s limits and requirements analysis (such as Exchange and SQL)

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