Storage

Storage for virtualization: New vendors, new protocols

Virtualization pros can make their lives easier by consolidating their storage vendors and considering Fibre Channel alternatives. That's according to a recent

EMC, VMware tighten storage integration

BOSTON -- Yesterday at EMC World, the focus was on virtualization and private cloud. Today the spotlight is shining on EMC's bread and butter, storage, but there's still some virtualization news to report. EMC made two announcements about improving storage integration with VMware. First, you can...

Making a P2V conversion: Tricks for systems with large storage

Converting a system with a large amount of locally attached storage can be a challenging task given the time required to perform the conversion. Here area a few tricks I've found that can help ease the pain on these types of conversion tasks.

• Private network: Making a...

Still mulling over a Greene-less VMware

It's been covered to death, but something about Diane Greene's ousting from VMware's top spot still doesn't sit right with me. Not the ousting itself but the chatter about why. There have been conversations about why she was let go, ranging from EMC's CEO

Take the time to learn direct disk access to a virtual machine

Recently I had the opportunity to go through a series of tests revolving around the use of a raw disk or dedicated logical unit number (LUN) to a virtual machine. I think that any virtualization administrator should go through the drill. The basic principle is to seamlessly move storage on a...

VMware defends its upcoming fault-tolerance feature

During VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas last week, VMware Inc. announced its upcoming fault tolerance feature and gave a

Getting to know Sun xVM VirtualBox snapshots

Desktop virtualization packages rely on snapshots and virtual drive functionality. The de facto functionality standard here is found in VMware Workstation and VMware Server, but the tools in Sun's VirtualBox may be setting a new standard. Let's take a quick look at how snapshots and virtual drives...

Ensuring disk resources with SCSI reservations

You may hear the term SCSI reservations frequently when dealing with VMware servers that utilize shared storage. SCSI reservations are used to ensure exclusive access to disk-based resources when multiple hosts are accessing the same shared storage resources. In addition...

Symantec, Citrix take on VMware with block storage management product

On Monday, June 9, Symantec Corp. of Cupterino, Calif., announced the release of Veritas Virtual Infrastructure (VxVI), a server and storage virtualization product built on

Storage utilization is a new battle

I was recently asked, "do you have any visibility of the storge utilization you provide your virtual machines?" I stopped, thought about it and said "no". However, in my situation, this is not yet a problem. A pitfall for most enterprise server virtualization strategies is in a reservation for...