Bryan Semple, who is Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel wrote a paper titled: 3 Ways Storage & Server Admins Unite to Enhance VMware Performance (Or – how to keep the peace between teams)
The paper which contains 4 pages and explores three steps to unify storage and virtualization teams within organizations, based on experiences which VKernel acquired from the field. He states that the friction is caused by the fact that storage administrators are no longer involved in understanding specific application loads.
Solving the problem is done in three steps.
- Comprehensive joint planning for application loads: Application owners, VM administrators, and storage administrators should review the expected load characteristics of an application prior to deployment with a goal of balancing loads across their infrastructure.
- Reduce storage consumption: A focus on controlling storage consumption is critical. Storage vendors offer de-duplication technology which is very effective in virtualized environments. Beyond de-duplication, zombie VMs, powered off VMs, abandoned images, old snapshots and templates should be proactively uncovered and eliminated to keep storage spending within budget.
- Provide the right information for troubleshooting: By detailing exactly which VMs and which data stores are suffering performance problems.
Conclusion:
“…Virtualized environments have introduced fresh points of contention between storage and server teams. With proper planning, a focus on containing storage consumption, and more proactive information sharing during troubleshooting, these contention points can be reduced and the full ROI for a virtualized environment can be achieved…”