Storage, Backup, and Small Business: Communities Roundtable #12
Today's guest on the VMware Communities Roundtable was VMware's own Paul Manning, and the topic was storage. Our conversation took us over to the world of small business and some of the considerations when you're trying to roll out virtualization and shared storage and backup on a tight budget. I'm afraid we didn't end up with much in the way of bullet points.
We did dive into technology for a bit towards the end. Paul sums up some of his general thoughts on different storage protocols (Fibre Channel vs IP-based storage) around 45:00 and at 46:30 we get into NPIV. Listen via the widget to the right, mp3, iTunes feed, straight podcast feed. (56:38)
Let's get linking:
- Storage white papers at VMware
- Left Hand Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA)
- Xtravirt Virtual SAN (XVS)
- NPIV
- N_Port ID Virtualization (Wikipedia)
- NPIV Storage options for virtual machines: Raw device mappings, VMFS (SearchVMware.com)
- How NPIV-Based LUN Access Works (VMware)
- pages 90-94 of the Fibre Channel SAN Configuration Guide (VMware PDF)
At 2:47 Paul mentions he spends quite a but of time talking to customers about the trade offs and considerations about connecting guests straight to storage (expect this is relating to iSCSI and the Microsoft initiator). The whole conversation got a bit sidetracked and Paul never got to talk about this. Maybe you could cover this again or maybe get Paul to discuss this on the VMTN forums.
Rodos
Posted by: Rodos | August 20, 2008 at 03:55 AM
How to use VCB and Networker 7.3 to backup with SAN storage ? Thanks .
Posted by: Leo | August 22, 2008 at 05:06 AM
Can you not just use a regular file backup for this purpose? I recommend you look into tools like mozy. take a look here: http://internet-backup-service.com
Posted by: Jens.Soe | September 19, 2008 at 07:01 AM