I mentioned that storage can be a bottleneck in your VDI performance if not carefully designed. Allocating a large number of disks in your VDI storage can help mitigate this risk and meet the high I/O demand placed by the VDI workload on the underlying storage. However this can lead to overprovisioning of storage, introducing cost-inefficiencies in your VDI environment. Additionally, moving the entire client attached storage to datacenter is also cost prohibitive. The right storage solution for your VDI should help mitigate the performance challenges while minimizing storage footprint, and thus lower costs. In this post, we will explore a few key storage features that are critical to ensure your VDI project success.

Gaining efficiencies with Clones:

To combat the spiraling storage footprint, clones can be the key feature in VDI storage. Clones work by creating a few base or gold images, and clones linked to these base images. VMware Linked Clones use this approach. It is important to design and configure the base images carefully. The base images contain virtual machines comprising of the OS and the applications that the desktop clients need. Depending on your needs, you may want to create multiple base images that satisfy your user needs. Clones linked to these base images are typically very small in size. All virtual desktops read from the base images and any writes are captured in the clones which contain only the delta data. In order to leverage this VMware feature, the underlying storage must support clones. Dell EqualLogic supports clones and can effectively leverage Linked Clones to help reduce your storage needs.

EqualLogic also offers space efficient Thin Clones which are linked to EqualLogic Template Volumes. The Template Volumes typically contain multiple VM images which can be configured optimally and space efficiently to serve the user needs while minimizing storage requirements. You can learn more about EqualLogic Thin Clones in this whiteboarding session with Will Urban, a technical marketing engineer with Dell.

Tiered storage for right-sizing your VDI environment:

In the last post we saw that typically if you design your storage to satisfy your performance needs, you end up with a lot bigger storage footprint than your end users actually need. This of course is an issue, because then your storage becomes too costly and hurts your VDI project ROI. To overcome this challenge, using tiered storage may be the answer.

Tiered storage typically consists of two or more drive types in a single storage pool. All drive types can handle different number of IOPS. Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, for example, can handle an upwards of 5000 IOPS, far higher than any other spinning media can. But with performance comes the price. SSD drives are also quite a lot more expensive compared to SAS or SATA drives. To optimize the cost-performance ratio, it makes sense to auto-tier between SSD drives and SAS or SATA drives. By tiering your VDI workload you can be sure that during I/O storms, frequently accessed (hot) data pages will be automatically migrated to the higher performance drives, thus withstanding high I/O demand placed on your storage.

Dell EqualLogic PS 6000XVS and 6010XVS are multi-tiered hybrid arrays featuring SSD and SAS drives in a single enclosure with auto-tiering capabilities. You may have heard that InfoWorld awarded their 2011 Technology of the year award for “Best Storage System” to Dell EqualLogic PS6010XVS. In November 2010, Dell performed some tests using these hybrid arrays. The testing involved setting up a VDI environment using VMware vSphere and VMware View with Dell PowerEdge Servers and one Dell EqualLogic PS 6000XVS hybrid array. The tests used VMware Linked Clones. The results are quite impressive, successfully hosting about 1000 virtual desktops with latency well below 20ms, on a single XVS array. Here is a quick summary of the test results. You can also take a look at the sizing and best practices guide involving these tests.

Optimizing performance through storage-hypervisor integration:

Hypervisor technologies have matured quite a bit over the past few years. Virtualization platforms now offer integration points for storage that help enhance performance. Some storage arrays are better integrated with hypervisor or virtualization layer than others. This integration makes a tremendous difference in performance of your VDI environment. Through this integration, the hypervisor can offload certain storage related tasks to the storage arrays, thus substantially minimizing network traffic and host server overheads.

VMware introduced their vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) with vSphere 4.5. This integration helps offloading of tasks like hardware assisted locking, full-copy and block-zeroing to storage arrays. Tasks such as creation of template volumes and VM deployments from templates benefit substantially from offloading of these functions to storage. Additionally, in a typical VDI environment, many VMs share one volume and simultaneously access information from the shared volume. By utilizing hardware assisted locking, storage administrators can ensure that the entire volume is not locked by a single VM or a single VMware ESX host at a time, and that the performance of shared volumes does not deteriorate. Dell EqualLogic was one of the first storage solutions to implement VAAI and Dell lab tests have shown that the VAAI integration for Dell EqualLogic storage arrays reduced SAN traffic by up to 95%, and host CPU overheads by up to 75%.

Storage arrays that support multipath I/O can also help improve performance and availability of your VDI deployments. Dell EqualLogic Multipath Extension Module (MEM) for VMware integrates with VMware vStorage APIs for Multipathing. It provides fault-tolerant load balancing and helps improve storage performance and scalability while automating multipath configuration.

Storage that helps simplify VDI deployments:

I mentioned in my first blog post in this series that your VDI administrators are responsible for provisioning and managing a very large pool of desktop VMs. This is quite unlike virtualizing enterprise applications. Your VDI administrators need ways to simplify and streamline desktop VM provisioning in order to achieve operational efficiencies and eliminate any sources of errors. Some storage arrays offer ways to rapidly provision multiple desktop VMs. Dell EqualLogic, for example, offers Virtual Desktop Deployment Tool. This tool utilizes EqualLogic Template Volumes and Thin Clones to lower storage needs, and a process flow that substantially reduces complexities in rapid VM provisioning. This tool is integrated with VMware View and is available at no additional cost, just like all EqualLogic software features. You can see a quick demonstration of this EqualLogic Virtual Desktop Deployment Tool and learn how simple it is to rapidly provision multiple desktop VMs using this software feature.

In general, to simplify VDI deployments, it is important to choose a storage solution that automates administrative tasks and simplifies storage management. Not all storage solutions do that. Check out in these whiteboarding sessions to see how Dell EqualLogic offers tools that take the complexity out of storage management for your VDI.

Choosing the right storage connectivity and architecture:

When it comes to choosing the connectivity for your storage infrastructure, you can choose from Fibre Channel (FC) SAN, Internet SCSI (iSCSI) SAN, or Network Attached Storage (NAS). In the past, FC offered benefits by accommodating up to 4 or 8 Gbps speeds. FC however, requires specialized networking devices and fabric that are expensive compared to Ethernet alternatives. FC also requires your SAN administrators to be trained on specialized networking technologies. Today, with 10 Gb Ethernet connectivity, iSCSI SANs can offer network speeds comparable to or better than FC SANs. Through the use of standards-based Ethernet networking technology, iSCSI can help lower cost of your SAN and simplify networking.

Typically, most VDI deployments are implemented in phases. To accommodate this phased roll-out approach, you need a storage architecture that scales easily and non-disruptively. Most traditional SAN architectures are rigid, making it difficult to grow the storage as needs grow.

Dell EqualLogic arrays utilize virtualized iSCSI SAN scale-out architecture that easily scales as your needs grow, without service disruption. This can be invaluable since it simplifies planning and virtually eliminates the need for forklift upgrades, helping protect your investments.

Take Away:

In this series I highlighted the critical success factors for your VDI project success and explained how storage plays a key role in enabling this success. I also illustrated one way to size storage for your VDI so it does not become a bottleneck and provides optimal user experience. In this third post I reviewed key storage features to help optimize performance, lower costs and simplify VDI provisioning. Dell EqualLogic family of virtualized iSCSI SANs offers the features essential to ensure success of your VDI projects. You can find several resources that can help you through your VDI planning at www.dellenterprise.com/getmorevirtual/virtualdesktops

Wish you good luck with your VDI projects!

• For those of us who aren’t experts in the field of storage virtualization, we compiled the basics of storage virtualization to start the month off on the right foot.
• For real-time information on the goings-on in storage virtualization, we compiled the best of the best storage and virtualization pros to follow on Twitter.
• Despite the age of 140-character conversations, IT books are still a great way to get all the information you need in one place, and these storage virtualization books come highly recommended.
• For everything else, we have our Storage Virtualization Multimedia Guide, including top storage and virtualization blogs that have serious credibility in their respective expert communities.
• Storage virtualization is one of the best ways to celebrate Earth Day all year round.

Storage Virtualization 101

The Storage Network Industry Association has a booklet that covers the “different terms, types, locations, and technologies of storage virtualization and the data services that can be built on it” as well as descriptions of “implementation step by step and aspects of availability, performance, and capacity improvements.” Whether you’re interested in the role of storage virtualization or the many hypotheticals of the deployment, check out the SNIA’s booklet on storage virtualization (PDF).

Storage Virtualization FAQs

From Open IT Forum discussions to members curious about the technology, we’ve seen some thought-provoking discussions. Have a question about storage virtualization that wasn’t asked in the forums? Head over and ask it yourself. And don’t forget to tag it “storage virtualization”!

• What is the most important component of a virtualization strategy?
  
• What’s your attitude toward storage virtualization?
• Choosing disks for virtualization storage
• How does virtualization change my storage needs? (An important question, considering 43 percent of IT organizations underestimate or forget to calculate the impact storage will have on a virtualization project.)

And More…

For regular updates on virtualized storage like this one on the important niche of storage virtualization products and this great jumping off point for your own storage virtualization pros and cons list, check out SearchVirtualStorage.com.

Check out the Storage Decisions seminar on Storage for Virtual Environments for a one-day tutorial on maximizing your virtualization deployment with storage made specifically for your new environment.

Do Tell!

Did you enjoy Storage Virtualization month? Share one thing you learned in the comments section, and we’ll share 25 knowledge points to go toward our latest contest!

Next month on IT Knowledge Exchange…

May’s theme is Networking at IT Knowledge Exchange! Editor Michael Morisy is heading to Interop, so keep an eye for coverage of the festivities. Are you heading to Interop next month as well? Reach out and let Michael know at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Bring your questions, ideas, and suggestions to the forums and the blogs. Learn something, teach something, and earn great prizes!

Are there other topics you would be interested in seeing explored around IT Knowledge Exchange in the future? Let us know in the comments section or send me an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Highest profile, of course, was Amazon’s EC2 outage that took out sites like Reddit, FourSquare and, according to one forum poster, cardiac monitoring tools. Lives, then, might literally have been at stake.

In another cloud/consumer blow, Dropbox updated its terms of service, making explicit its willingness to turn your data, hosted on their servers, over to the authorities. Not surprising, but another chip of control taken away from the data owner.

And finally, it was made public that the iPhone is tracking your every move, leading to spooky maps that, in some cases, go back years and which could potentially be used against their owners in legal matters.

I wish I felt gleefully vindicated, but the truth is that these are minor setbacks in a much larger trend, and it’s time to take a careful reassessment of what the new normal is in a world where data policies and even uptime are largely dictated by consumer companies such as Amazon, Apple and even small web startups that might be here one day, gone the next.

• Downtime doesn’t always equal disaster. There’s a great scene in the Social Network where Jesse Eisenberg channeling Mark Zuckerberg yells that Facebook can never go down. In reality, Facebook does occasionally (but very rarely) go down, as does most every service. I’ve even used some web services that keep something sadly close to regular business hours, with planned downtime for most of the evening every single night. The reality is that for most web services, the golden 5 Nines of uptime is simply not worth the extra cost.
• The benefits are real. Consumerized IT, whether it’s smarter smart phones, more productive communication, more collaborative work, or any other of a thousand changes, has brought real benefits that decades of top-down budget-driven initiatives have failed to deliver.
• The risks are real. See above, but also see the very real compliance risks, data leakage risks, and more.

Welcome back folks. This is the second post in a series of three blog posts discussing storage considerations for VDI deployments. In my last post I highlighted the critical success factors for your VDI projects, and how your storage infrastructure plays a central role in ensuring successful VDI roll-out. I also mentioned that one way to meet the desired VDI performance is to increase the number of disks in your storage environment. While this can lead to overprovisioning of storage, it is important to understand how increasing the number of disks can help you meet your performance goals. In this post I will provide a simple example that illustrates how to size the storage for your VDI environment in order to ensure optimal performance and user experience.

Sizing storage for VDI can be especially tricky. On one hand, you need to ensure realistic performance. On the other hand, you are under a lot of pressure to minimize storage footprint in order to lower storage related costs. When designing a VDI environment, it is critical to ensure that your storage does not become a bottleneck. VDI is a highly transactional workload and its performance is bound by disk I/Os. One way storage administrators can meet the I/O demand is by increasing the number of storage disks in their VDI environment. It is important to look at the peak IOPS demand that will be placed on the underlying storage, and design your storage to handle those peak IOPS. There is no simple formula for assessing your IOPS needs. It will vary for every organization depending on their desktop user types, and boot and login patterns. I will take a simple example here and go about identifying the peak IOPS needs and further the size of the storage needed to support those IOPS.

VDI Storage Sizing Exercise

Let us say that we are designing a VDI environment for 100 desktops. We estimate that about 80% of those desktops will boot in the morning simultaneously and then stay online rest of the day. Remaining 20% of the desktops will boot and perform operations during the night time.

Let us assume that we estimate each desktop to produce a peak of 25 IOPS while booting up, and then an average of about 5 IOPS throughout the steady state operations before logging off. The logoff operation creates a peak of 15 IOPS per desktop.

We also estimate that we will grow our VDI environment by up to 50% in the next 5 years and we are designing the VDI environment to support this growth.

As it is evident, the boot operation is the most I/O intensive and thus, we should be sizing our storage to support the performance requirements during boot periods.

So the 80 desktops (80% of 100 desktops) will produce 80 X 25 = 2000 IOPS when they are booting up in the morning simultaneously.

To account for the anticipated growth, we will need to support up to 50% more IOPS in the next 5 years as we grow our VDI environment. So we need to design our storage to support 2000 X 1.5 = 3000 IOPS in order to effectively address the peak IOPS requirements for the next 5 years.

Let us assume that we will be using 15K RPM SAS drives to support this VDI environment, and that each 15K SAS drive can support 150 IOPS.

Hence we will need 3000 / 150 = 20 of the 15K SAS drives in our storage to handle the peak IOPS.

This example assumes RAID 0 policy and no spare disks.

This is a simple example, but should help illustrate the decision process. The key is to estimate, as accurately as possible, the IOPS patterns for your specific environment. It is important to note that the IOPS patterns vary drastically between organizations. Dell offers consulting services that can help you analyze your VDI needs to meet the required performance goals.

Take Away:

Inadequate storage performance in your VDI can lead to less than acceptable user experience. While sizing storage for your VDI, it is important to design it to deliver adequate performance and user experience. VDI storage needs to be sized to handle peak IOPS demand placed by the VDI workloads. The I/O patterns vary drastically from organization to organization, and a critical analysis of your end user profiles is essential to accurately estimate the peak demands placed on your storage infrastructure.

It is important to recognize that overprovisioning your storage in order to meet the performance goals is cost-inefficient. In my next and the last post in this series, I will discuss some critical features and considerations for your VDI storage that can help mitigate performance challenges while optimizing storage footprint and enabling a simple, streamlined desktop VM provisioning model. Stay tuned.

The federal Department of Energy cites data centers as three percent of U.S. electricity usage, “amounting to 120 billion kilowatt hours per year, at a cost of $7.4 billion.” As data creation increases year over year and thus increased need for storage space and support, greater efficiency is the best option for IT departments moving forward. From paper usage to data center energy reduction, there’s always a way that IT can lower costs and usage.

One recent green IT project of note is Facebook’s Open Compute Project, where the company revealed the specs and design of its custom-built data center in Prineville, OR. When compared to its leased data center, Facebook’s Prineville facility received an impressive PUE rating: 1.07 PUE versus 1.4 – 1.6 PUE for Prineville and 1.5 PUE for the national average.

For a company capable of building its own data center, the open-sourced project is a gold mine for green initiatives. For companies less capable, there is the hope that vendors will adopt some of the social network’s resource and energy-saving designs.

Other Green Options

Take advantage of technologies such as virtualization to reduce overall data center costs. Power consumption, server and CPU count can be reduced up to 50% in some cases.

Reuse old hardware or wipe it clean and donate to a recycling center to be used for parts or donated to a nonprofit organization. Upgrading to the latest version or overhauling your data center doesn’t mean you have to trash your old one. Research recycling options that can also serve as a tax write-off.

For further information on how to use virtualization to green your IT department, check out this guide from SearchServerVirtualization.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives told Reuters, “These guys are just in the right place at the right time. They are in the middle of what continues to be just a monster product cycle.”

EMC chairman and chief executive Joe Tucci issued a statement that EMC’s early and strong start positions the company well for “significant opportunity for long-term growth potential ahead.” The company points at its “market-leading virtualization and information infrastructure products and services,” such as its Symmetrix storage product and mid-tier storage products, as reasons for its tremendous growth in a down economy. Tucci also recognized EMC’s unique position “squarely at the intersection of two of the most sweeping trends in IT – cloud computing and Big Data.”

Is your company one of the reasons EMC and VMware are on the ups? Share your outlook or attitude toward virtualization in the comments section or send me an email directly at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

@storageio: Member Gregs, or Greg Schulz of StorageIO.com, is an independent blogger, advisor, author, and consultant in the storage industry.

@SFoskett: Enterprise IT consultant whose focus is data storage and virtualization.

@storagebod:His experience as a storage manager lends to his knowledge of storage via disk and tape.

@storageanarchy:Business strategist and enterprise storage technologist.

@StorageNerve: A chief technology officer knowledgeable in storage and virtualization systems.

@StorageMojo: “A data storage analyst, consultant, and blogger focused on emerging markets, technologies, and products.”

@HPStorageGuy: Calvin Zito of HP Storage tweets about the technology, which he’s been involved in since the mid-90s.

Virtualization Pros

@ericsiebert: Author, blogger, vExpert, and VMware evangelist.

@rbrambley: He’s a blogger with interest or experience in virtualization, Veeam, VMware, Microsoft, VMETC.com, and Virtumania.

@gabvirtualworld: This virtualization geek knows VMware.

@VMDoug: Employee of Veeam software, Doug knows VMware, virtualization, and Hyper-V.

@sbeaver:This author and speaker is a virtualization evangelist.

@Beaker: If you’re in IT and on Twitter, chances are you’re following this guy anyway, but I wanted to throw him in for good measure. He works in cloud and virtualization security at Cisco, and he’s pretty entertaining as well.

Have someone to add to the mix? Let us know in the comments or send me an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Storage Virtualization Books

• Storage Virtualization: Technologies for Simplifying Data Storage and Management: Tom Clark offers a vendor agnostic view of storage virtualization and its many implementations. Available as an e-book, this title is a great way for professionals of all areas of IT to get familiar with the technology.

Member Gregs, or Greg Schulz of Storageio.com, has several books that include storage virtualization, including an upcoming summer release.

• Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible, Scalable Data Infrastructures:  “This book explains the components, as well as how to design and implement a resilient storage network for SMB, workgroup, departmental, and enterprise environments.”
• The Green and Virtual Data Center: This book considers how to grow a business in an environmentally-friendly manner, and “looks at design and implementation tradeoffs using various best practices and technologies to sustain application and business growth while maximizing resources, such as power, cooling, floor space, storage, server performance, and network capacity.”
• Cloud and Virtual Data Center: To be released Summer 2011, Shulz most recent book “provides comprehensive coverage of IT data storage networking infrastructure, including public and private cloud, virtualization, and traditional IT environments.” For strategies on design, implementation, and management, check out this forthcoming title.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Welcome folks! This blog post is first in the series of three posts that will discuss challenges related to virtual desktop deployments and explore ways to overcome these challenges. In the first post we will primarily discuss the impact a VDI workload can have on the supporting storage system, and how that affects your VDI project success.

With proliferation on many client devices that vary in form factor, desktop virtualization may be the most relevant technology for streamlining client device management and providing a consistent user experience. By separating operating system and applications from physical client devices, desktop virtualization helps streamline management, lower operational expenses and facilitate adherence to compliance and security requirements.

However, if not correctly designed, desktop virtualization can spell disaster.  There are three primary factors that determine the success of your VDI project:

• User experience that is consistent and acceptable by the end users
• A positive ROI that justifies this shift in client computing model
• Simple and streamlined desktop VM provisioning

And storage is the critical element in addressing all of these factors. Storage plays a vital role in enabling successful VDI roll-out. Let us take a quick look at what it means for storage to host and service your virtual desktop workloads.

Why storage matters:

First of all, VDI is not just another enterprise workload. VDI workload is highly variable in terms of I/O demand it places on supporting storage infrastructure. Storage that supports a VDI environment essentially stores the virtual machines that power the client devices. Every time a client device accesses the OS, application or user data, it generates I/O requests for the storage infrastructure. As you can imagine, this access pattern is not evenly spread-out over the course of the day. There are periods of time when many client devices are accessing large amounts of data from the VDI infrastructure, and the supporting storage arrays. For example, in the morning when a large number of client devices boot simultaneously, they generate massive amounts of I/O requests for the storage devices. These are called boot storms. If the storage is not able to service these requests within acceptable latency, the client devices experience delays and the user experience is compromised.

Overprovisioning of storage can help solve this issue to some extent. By overprovisioning, you allocate more storage capacity, and thereby typically more disk drives, to your VDI than you really need. The ability of storage to handle certain number of Input Output Operations per Second (IOPS) is a function of the number of disk drives it contains. A larger number of disk drives in the storage system can support a higher IOPS demand. However, this is cost-inefficient. That leads us to our second challenge; the cost of your storage system.

It is important to realize that when you implement VDI, you are actually moving the entire client attached storage; all the local hard disk drives (HDD); over to your enterprise datacenter. The storage infrastructure that supports VDI deployments is more costly than the client attached HDDs. When you combine the need for lots of enterprise storage, with the possibility of overprovisioning capacity to meet performance goals, costs can become an issue. Carefully managing your storage footprint is critical in order to achieve the ROI.

Lastly, your VDI administrators are responsible for provisioning and managing a very large pool of desktop VMs. In order to achieve operational efficiency and eliminate sources of errors, they need ways to efficiently and rapidly provision multiple desktop VMs from predefined templates. Tightly integrated storage and hypervisor management plays a key role in enabling rapid VM deployments and simplifying VDI management.

I will discuss throughout this blog series the possible ways you can manage and mitigate these storage challenges.

Take away:

A successful VDI implementation can help streamline desktop management, lower operational expenses, and facilitate security and compliance adherence. However, inadequate design considerations can lead to failure. While designing your VDI environment, it is critical that you ensure acceptable user experience, positive project ROI, and a rapid and streamlined VM provisioning model. Proper storage selection can help ensure optimal performance, reduce storage footprint and speed VDI provisioning. Storage is the key enabler in ensuring a successful VDI roll-out.

In the next blog post, I will go over a storage sizing illustration for delivering optimal user experience. Following that, in my third and final post in this series, I will explore key storage features that enable successful VDI implementations. Stay tuned.

Storage Virtualization Blogs

From new products and companies to reviews and step-by-step guides on new storage virtualization products, sign up for these RSS feeds for the latest information on the technology.

• The Virtual Storage Guy: One of NetApp’s blogs, The Virtual Storage Guy offers blog posts on topics such as virtual storage tiering and desktop virtualization.
• VMware Virtualization Management Blog: If you’re using or considering using VMware products for your virtualization project, check out their virtualization management blog for updates or tips.
• Ruptured Monkey: Check out this solutions architect’s blog on “all things storage and virtualization in the data center.”
• Pack Rat: Stephen Foskett knows storage, and his blog covers general storage topics from storage products to common IT habits regarding data storage and management.
• Virtual Lifestyle: For more information from a certified VMware specialist on all things storage, check out Joep Piscaer’s blog.
• The Storage Architect: This blog has coverage and reviews of storage and virtualization products and techniques.
• Around the Storage Block: Calvin Zito of HP Storage blogs about all things storage, which he’s been working in for over 25 years.

Of course, IT Knowledge Exchange has a wealth of blogs on storage and virtualization as well:

• The Virtualization Room: From the editors at SearchServerVirtualization, this blog sometimes covers the storage side of your virtualization needs.
• Storage Soup: For general commentary on the storage industry, including storage virtualization techniques, check out this blog from SearchStorage.com.
• Enterprise IT Watch Blog: Check out the IT Watch Blog’s coverage of storage virtualization.

Storage Virtualization Videos, Guides, and More

Member Slack400 shared some links to his favorite storage virtualization guides and how-tos:

• Hyper-V installation demo
• Hyper-V Guide
• P2V Migration Tips
• VMware keyboard shortcuts

Check back next week for the Storage Virtualization Twitter professionals and books to watch out for! Share some of your favorite places to go for information on the subject, and we’ll share 50 knowledge points with you.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.