Virtual systems and hybrid cloud storage

IT teams use virtualization technology to consolidate, relocate, and scale applications to keep pace with the organization’s business demands and to reduce their operating costs. Hypervisors, such as ESX and ESXi from VMware and Hyper-V from Microsoft, create logical system images called virtual machines (VMs) that are independent of system hardware thereby enabling IT teams to work much more efficiently and quickly.

But virtualization creates problems for storage administrators who need more time to plan and implement changes. The storage resources for ESX and ESXi hypervisors are Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) files, and for Hyper-V hypervisors, they are Virtual Hard Disk  (VHD) files. While VMs are rapidly moved from one server to another, moving the associated VMDKs and VHDs from one storage system to another is a much slower process. VMs can be relocated from one server to another without relocating the VMDKs and VHDs, but the  process of load balancing for performance usually involves shifting both VMs and VMDKS/VHDs. Data growth complicates the situation by consuming storage capacity, which degrades performance for certain VMs, and forces the IT team to move VMDKs/VHDs from one storage system to another, which can set off a chain reaction of VMDK/VHD relocations along the way. Hybrid cloud storage gracefully expands the capacity of storage, including VMDKs and VHDs, eliminating the need to move them for capacity reasons. By alleviating the pressures of data growth, hybrid cloud storage creates a more stable environment for VMs.

Source of Information : Rethinking Enterprise Storage