Cloud-Ready, Scale-Out Storage

Best Practices for Deploying Highly Resilient,
Cloud-Ready, Scale-Out Storage Infrastructures
Using VMware vSphere 4 and Xiotech ISE
Xiotech’s ISE (aka Emprise 5000) and VMware vSphere 4 bring together the concepts of
consolidation, high availability and fault tolerance for both storage and servers.
This document contains virtualization concepts and scalable configurations using the
ISE and VMware vSphere.
It is intended for IT Professionals managing virtual
servers and storage.
Chad Bittner
Technical Marketing
Xiotech Corporation
Rev 1.0
White Paper

Best Practices for Deploying Highly Resilient, Cloud-Ready, Scale-Out
Storage Infrastructures Using VMware vSphere 4 and Xiotech ISE
1
Table of Contents
Introduction.....................................................................................................................2
Xiotech ISE (aka Emprise 5000) Overview....................................................................3
Lowest Capital and Operating Costs.....................................................................4
VMware vSphere™ 4 Overview.......................................................................................6
Why Xiotech ISE and VMware vSphere 4?...................................................................7
Deploying a Virtualized Environment............................................................................7
Configuring the ISE........................................................................................................8
Configuring the VMware vSphere 4 Cluster.................................................................11
VMware vSphere 4 Backup and Replication Methodologies.....................................15
Backup Methodologies........................................................................................15
ReplicationMethodologies...................................................................................16
Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 17

2
Introduction
In today’s world, every company is attempting to do more while minimizing investments in new
technology. This is known as the “do more with less” principal. Virtualization is the vehicle that
many companies have adopted as the leading strategy for achieving this goal. Virtualization has
many forms, but the primary forms used by companies are Server Virtualization and Storage
Virtualization.
Server Virtualization can be simply explained as running multiple Guest OSes or Virtual Machines
on a single physical host, allowing for more effective use of physical CPU and memory resources. In
reality, server virtualization is a very complex balancing act. All server virtualization products have
varying ways to help make this balancing act automated and transparent so that administrators can
easily implement the server virtualization software.
Storage Virtualization can be simply explained as a pool of storage that is provisioned in many
ways depending on the application. Like server virtualization, storage virtualization allows
administrators to purchase storage in large blocks and then provision out just what is needed for a
specification application. This allows for centralization of the storage and easier management, as
opposed to the traditional individual server based storage.
VMware vSphere 4 and the ISE are leading technologies in the virtualization market and one of the
easiest to implement. As virtualization technologies continue to penetrate the market, choosing the
right solution will be an integral part of the IT budget.

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Xiotech ISE Overview
It is very important to understand the storage involvement in a virtualized infrastructure. Regardless
if you are talking about server, switch or storage virtualization, the storage is the foundation and
core of it all.
Xiotech’s ISE system is a revolutionary concept in data storage. It is built on patented Intelligent
Storage Element® (ISE) technology and provides a perfectly balanced building block of virtualized
storage with performance, reliability, and scalability that delivers the lowest total cost of ownership
of any SAN or SAN-like storage system on the market.
Key ISE characteristics:
• Flexible storage building block – attach one directly to a server or many via a switch
• More IOPS, important for database and Web serving applications, key for virtualization
• Greater throughput for applications like data warehousing and decision support
• Dense capacity – use 30% less of your data center for the same amount of storage
• Linear scaling of both performance and capacity – multiply your IOPS, MBps, Gbps, and
TB simply by plugging additional systems into a switch
• Better scaling for all applications at all times with less trouble
• More than 100x the reliability of traditional disk drives – never replace a drive again
• Minimal attention needed from experts and tuning from administrators
• Lowest capital and operating costs in the industry
• Reduced power and cooling costs through automated shut-down and power-up
capabilities of PowerNAP™
Back to Basics: Don’t Pay for What You Don’t Need
Typical SAN systems come with high-level functionality you may not need, and all that functionality
adds to the price tag. It also consumes performance and introduces a lot of complexity, which often
requires high-priced administrators.
ISE, on the other hand, is a flexible, foundational building block of storage. It is a complete, self-
enclosed virtualized storage solution, which you can configure to meet your unique needs or
optimize for a specific application. It provides superior capabilities in the dimensions that matter
most: performance, reliability, cost, and ease of use.

4
Start Small, Grow Big: You can start with a single ISE system direct-attached to a server. It is easy
to deploy and requires little ongoing administration. As your needs grow, simply add a switch and
plug in more ISE systems. You can grow your storage network virtually without limits, without ever
losing your investment.
Use It Right Where You Need It: ISE offers an easy-to-deploy, cost-effective solution for a variety of
applications.
Get Everything You Pay For
Typical SAN performance is limited by bottlenecks in the system—from SAN controllers that slow
data movement to back-end switches that add another point of contact. Scalability also is restricted
by how many drives you can effectively put behind a set of controllers.
ISE changes this paradigm. It eliminates the storage controllers on the front end and switches on
the back, so data is free to flow at screaming speeds. And because storage is decoupled from the
servers, you can add servers solely for processing power—and gain the full capabilities of each.
Keep Your Data Safe
With typical SANs, disk drive failure is inevitable, expensive, and puts your data at risk. When a disk
fails, a human must pull the failed drive and insert a replacement—of the right kind. This takes time
and effort, and mistakes can be devastating. What’s more, data must be rebuilt on the new drive.
This process can take hours or days, introduces further risk to your data, and can cause system
performance to plummet.
ISE with its ISE technology provides reliability that other storage systems can’t touch—extending
reliability by orders of magnitude beyond that of a single drive.
Never Touch Another Disk: Instead of individual disk drives, ISE utilizes sealed DataPacs.
Preventive diagnostics keep the disk drives within the DataPacs running longer, and self-healing
capabilities repair those that do fail—in-place, without human intervention, and without impacting
normal operation or performance.
Lowest Capital and Operating Costs
Switch-connected ISE systems cost less to buy and much less to maintain than any other SAN-
like solution.
Better for Your Data Center: ISE uses 30% less space than traditional storage devices to provide
the same capacity, significantly reducing your square footage costs. ISE also reduces power and
cooling costs.
No Bottlenecks: Storage controllers, back-end switches, and high-end features of typical SAN

5
systems not only introduce bottlenecks, they increase up-front costs while adding complexity—
which often leads to expensive vendor services.
All the Performance, Not All the Disk: Many storage vendors must load their systems with a large
number of disk drives in order to come close to the performance of a single ISE system. This drives
up the costs of their systems, while introducing more opportunities for disk-related failures. ISE
delivers the performance you need without the extra disk.
VMware vSphereTM
4 Overview
Leverage the power of virtualization to transform your IT infrastructure into private clouds built on

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VMware vSphere—enabling IT to increase control through service-level automation. VMware vSphere,
the industry’s most reliable virtualization platform, dramatically reduces capital and operating costs
and maximizes IT efficiency—with the freedom to choose any application, OS, or hardware.
At a high level, VMware vSphere 4
vCompute includes:
VMware vCenter Server: Provides a
central point of control for virtualization
management, essential for administering
infrastructure and application services,
with deep visibility into every aspect of
virtual infrastructure, automation of day to
day operational tasks and the scalability to
manage large datacenter environments.
VMware ESX and VMware ESXi Server:
Provide a robust, production-proven, high
performance virtualization layer that abstract
server hardware resources and allow their
sharing by multiple virtual machines. Unique
memory management and advanced
scheduling capabilities of VMware ESX and
ESXi allow for the highest consolidation
ratios and the best application performance,
in many cases, even better than physical
servers.
VMware DRS: Aggregates compute
resources across many clusters and
dynamically allocates them to virtual
machines based on business priorities,
reducing management complexity through
automation.
VMware DPM: Included with VMware DRS,
automates energy efficiency in DRS clusters
by continuously optimizing the power
consumed in a DRS cluster.
Fig. 1. VMware vSphere 4 (VMware)

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Why Xiotech ISE and VMware vSphere 4?
Xiotech and VMware together provide easy to use, cost effective, storage and server virtualization
solutions for business’s today. By focusing on automation, ease of use, high availability, and improved
infrastructure scalability, our customers realize greater flexibility in building a dynamic technology
infrastructure. The ISE’s innovative approach to storage compliments VMware vSphere’s approach to
virtualization. The advanced capabilities of the ISE related to performance, reliability and modularity
are an architectural match for vSphere and its advanced resource management.
Xiotech is a Select Member of the VMware Technology Alliance Program and long time partner of
VMware. By combining our technologies, customers have been able to deploy a virtualized solution
that not only encompasses virtualized servers but storage as well, while minimizing their total cost
of ownership (TCO) and maximizing their return on investment (ROI).
Deploying a Virtualized Environment
The configuration represented in this document is two or more vSphere servers connected to one
or more ISE’s via an FC switch. The functionality and configuration of the ISE is identical in both
single and multiple ESX/ESXi servers, but the vSphere capabilities between the two are dramatically
different. In order to use the advance vSphere functionality of HA, DRS (VMotion), and fault
tolerance a minimum of a two node cluster with a vCenter server and proper licensing is required.
See figure 2.
S YS T
RP S
ST AT
SP EE D
MO DE
DU PL X
Cat alyst2970
vSphere Cluster
FC Switch
Emprise 5000 ISE
Fig. 2 Two Node Vmware vSphere Cluster
ISE

8
Configuring the ISE
This section describes configuring storage and connecting it to servers using the ISE Web based
interface. To access the ISE interface, browse via a web browser to one of the IP Addresses
assigned during the installation process. Once the required fibre channel zoning is in place, the
creation of storage LUNs and the presentation to the vSphere servers is a very simple process
requiring very little time and expertise.
First, create the shared storage
for the VMware vSphere HA/DRS
cluster. In order for virtual machines
to be protected by VMware HA or
load balanced using VMotion and
VMware DRS, they must be placed
on a shared VDisk.
In order to create the VDisk the
follow items need to be entered.
Name – this is the friendly name
for identification in the ISE. In this
example, we called the VDisk “V1”
Cache Policy – Select Write-Back
as the default cache policy
Capacity/Redundancy – Select
the Pool, Raid type and enter
the capacity of the VDisk to be
created for the Datastore. RAID 1
is the default and recommended
selection.
Fig. 3. Creating VDisks for Booting VMware ESX Server Hosts
Figure 3 shows the creation of a VDisk to be used as a datastore within the ESX environment.
Xiotech recommends that you create datastores that are 300GB to 1TB in size for the storage of
Virtual Machines. Raw Device Maps (RDM) can also used. However, they should be used only when
necessary for isolation of data or when creating a Microsoft Cluster with a physical and virtual node.
RDMs and VMFS Datastores are almost equal in performance expect when under very high I/O loads.
Note: When creating Datastores on the ISE they should be created in a manner that load balances
the DataPacs on the ISE. For example, when creating two datastores, they should be created so
that one datastore exists on Pool1 and the other exists on Pool 2.

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Next, create the host entries
for each ESX Server in the
cluster. When creating a host
entry, enter the name of the
server. This is simply a friendly
name that will be used in the
interface to identify the server.
Next select the Operating
system type of Linux as this is
the closest match to the ESX
server operating system. The
final entry is the WorldWide
Names (WWN) of the Fibre
channel ports in the ESX
server. Select all of the WWNs
that are associated with the
server and press the ‘Add’ to
configure them for that host.
Then press the ‘Submit’ button
at the bottom of the page.
Fig. 4. Host entry creation and WWN assignment
Figure 4 shows the first server in the ESX cluster. This physical host as a dual port QLogic QLE2462
FC HBA installed and zoned to see the ISE.
Note: When zoning the hosts to the ISE, a zone should be created for each FC port in the server
and zoned to a single controller on the ISE. This allows for multipathing and link resiliency in the
event that a cable, FC port, FC switch, switch port, or controller goes offline. Reference Xiotech’s
support matrix for further information on zoning requirements. http://xiotech.com/Support-Center.
aspx

10
Lastly, the VDisks need to
be assigned to the hosts.
This step allows the servers
to access the storage and is
configured under the VDisk.
Simply select the servers you
want to access the VDisk and
click the ‘Add” button. Once
the servers are in the ‘Selected
Hosts’ box, simply press the
‘Save Changes’ button at the
bottom of the page.
Fig. 5. Assigned VDisks to ESX hosts
Figure 5 shows the first VDisk being assigned to the two servers in the ESX cluster.

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Configuring the VMware vSphere 4 Cluster
Next configure the shared
storage for the templates
and virtual machines.
Using the Virtual
Infrastructure client, log into
the VMware vCenter server
and create a Datacenter by
right-clicking on Hosts &
Clusters and selecting New
Datacenter.
Right-click on the new
Datacenter and New Cluster.
Select both VMware HA and
VMware DRS. Now add the
VMware ESX hosts to the
cluster.
Fig. 6. Create Cluster
Next configure each host to
use the shared storage.
First, select an ESX
Server host and click the
Configuration tab.
Select Storage Adapters.
Verify that the host can see
the storage.
Fig. 7. Configure Hosts to See Storage
Next step is to create a
datastore, which is storage
that has been configured for
VMs.
From the Configuration tab,
select Storage (SCSI, SAN,
and NFS) to display the
available Datastores.
Select Add Storage.
Fig. 8. View Available Datastores

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Select the type of storage
you are adding to the ESX
Server host. In this case
the default of Disk/LUN is
correct.
Click Next.
Fig. 9. Select the Storage Type to Add
From the list of available
Disks/LUNs, select the LUN
you wish to configure.
Click Next.
Fig. 10. Select the LUN to Configure

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Verify the current disk layout
of the selected LUN is
correct.
Click Next.
Fig. 11. Verify Layout of the LUN
Enter a name for the
datastore. This will be used
to identify the datastore
when you create the VMs.
In Fig. 12, the datastore
name is SharedVM.
Fig. 12. Name the Datastore

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Format the disk/LUN using
the VMFS-3 file system.
VMware’s VMFS-3 file
system is designed to
accommodate VMware’s
use of very small files for
configuration and large files
for virtual disks.
Fig. 13. Format the Disk/LUN
Datastores are now
available for you to use
when creating VMs.
Reference VMware’s
Guest Operating System
Installation Guide for
information on creating
VMs.
Fig. 14. View Available Datastores

15
VMware vSphere 4 Backup and Replication Methodologies
Data protection is not an option, it is a business requirement. Loss of data or uptime can equal
loss of revenue. Organizations depend on data protection methods for daily recovery operations;
therefore, protecting vSphere from potential outages is a high priority. However, when an outage
does occur, it is the time it takes to recover the data and the recovery point that matter most.
A backup and replication strategy is measured by two indicators: recovery point objective (RPO)
and recovery time objective (RTO). RPO is the point in time (prior to the outage) to which systems
and data will be restored. RTO is the period of time after an outage at which the systems and data
will be available again. The lower the RPO and RTO, the better the reliability.
Recovering from an outage with a traditional backup/restore is typically time and resource intensive,
with data only as current as the last backup. If there is an outage and the last backup was
performed the night before, the recovery point is the previous day. All the data at the time of the
backup is recoverable. However, if the outage takes place late in the day following the last backup,
nearly an entire day of changed data is gone… lost forever. There is also the possibility that the
restore may not work at all, so having an effective methodology for data recovery is very important
and should not be taken lightly.
Backup Methodologies
VMware has a number of methods for the backup and recovery of VMs in the VMware ESX Server
environment.
• Traditional Backup: Deployment of a backup client to every VM that requires backup services.
• VMware Data Recovery: Provides a centralized management interface to enable backup and
recovery of your VMs directly through VMware vCenter Server.
• The entire inventory of VMs are automatically identified through VMware vCenter Server
• Uses an intuitive wizard driven workflow to create, configure and schedule backup jobs
• Multiple restore points for each VM are displayed to easily select a specific point in time
copy to restore
• Automatically monitors VMs that are moved by VMware HA, VMware VMotion and
VMware DRS, so scheduled backups continue uninterrupted

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• VMware Consolidated Backup: provides an easy to use, centralized backup facility for
VMware vSphere. Backing up your virtual machine contents from a centralized Microsoft
Windows 2003 proxy server rather than directly from VMware ESX lets you:
• Reduce the load on your VMware ESX server during backups
• Improve the manageability of your IT resources by using a single agent running on the
proxy server rather than having an agent on every virtual machine
• Eliminate backup traffic on the local area network by utilizing Fibre Channel tape
devices for virtual machine backups
Replication Methodologies
VMware supports two types of replication, Array/Hardware based and software based replication.
• Array/Hardware Replication: Provides replication using the either the native replication in a
storage array or an appliance that is in-line between the physical servers and the storage array.
This method of replication allows for a per Datastore or RDM level of replication control.
• VMware Site Recovery requires array based replication to in order to provide the
automated fail over and Disaster Recovery plan testing.
• Software Replication: Provides replication using either agents installed in the Guest OS of a
virtual machine or an application that interfaces directly with the VMware environment. This
method of replication allows for a per virtual machine level of replication control. Here are some
examples of software replication vendors:
• Vizioncore vReplicator is a virtual machine replication solution that enables disaster
recovery and business continuity by helping organizations meet recovery time
objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) while offering a low total cost of
ownership.
• Double-Take® Availability provides affordable data protection, ensures minimal data
loss and enables immediate recovery from any system outage. Double-Take Availability
continuously captures changes as they happen and replicates those changes to one or
more servers at any location, locally or globally.
• Veeam Backup and Replication offers a major breakthrough in full and incremental
backup speeds. Using technological advancements within VMware vSphere 4 and the
VMware vStorage APIs for data protection, Veeam customers experienced the following
benefits derived from native support of thin provisioned disks and changed block
tracking.

17
Conclusion
Virtualizing an IT infrastructure can be a bit overwhelming with all the media exposure it is receiving
today. A way to minimize this is to speak with virtualization professionals that have years of industry
experience and hands-on knowledge with virtualized products. Please contact Xiotech with any
questions you may have on this solution and they will be happy to discuss with you how the ISE and
VMware vSphere 4 can help meet your business needs.

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