In this chapter, we introduce you to the IBM VMware Midrange Storage Solutions and provide an overview of the components that are involved.

Many enterprises have implemented VMware or plan to implement it. VMware provides more efficient use of assets and lower costs by consolidating servers and storage. Applications that previously ran in under-utilized dedicated physical servers are migrated to their own virtual machine (or virtual server) that is part of a VMware ESX cluster or a virtual infrastructure.

As part of this consolidation, asset utilization typically can be increased from under 10% to over 85%. Applications that previously had dedicated internal storage now can use a shared networked storage system that pools storage to all of the virtual machines and their applications. Backup, restore, and disaster recovery become more effective and easier to manage. Because of the consolidated applications and their mixed workloads, the storage system must deliver balanced performance and high performance to support existing IT service-level agreements (SLAs). The IBM Midrange Storage Systems provide an effective means to that end.

IBM Midrange Storage Systems are designed to deliver reliable performance for mixed applications including transaction and sequential workloads. These workloads include applications that are typical of a virtual infrastructure, including email, database, web server, file server, data warehouse, and backup profiles. IBM offers a complete line of storage systems from entry-level systems to midrange systems to enterprise-level systems that are certified to work with VMware vSphere ESX Server.

The IBM Midrange Storage systems that are discussed in this publication include the DS5100, DS5300, and DS5020 models. These systems are included in the references throughout the manuals as DS-Series. We discuss these storage subsystems in greater detail later in Chapter 3, “Planning the VMware vSphere storage system design” on page 29.

All of these systems offer shared storage that enables all of VMware’s advanced functionality:

The IBM DS5000 storage systems include the following features:

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 (SRM) is supported on IBM DS3500, IBM DCS3700, and DS5000.

Many companies consider and employ VMware virtualization solutions to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization, and flexibility of their hardware. In fact, 100,000 clients have deployed VMware, including 90% of Fortune 1000 businesses. Yet maximizing the operational benefits from virtualization requires network storage that helps optimize the VMware infrastructure.

The IBM Midrange Storage Solutions for VMware offer clients:

VMware vSphere includes components and features that are essential for managing virtual machines. The following components and features form part of the VMware vSphere suite:

VMware vSphere ESXi is virtual infrastructure partitioning software that is designed for server consolidation, rapid deployment of new servers, increased availability, and simplified management. It helps to improve hardware utilization and save space, IT staffing, and hardware costs.

VMware vSphere virtualizes the entire IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networks. It groups these heterogeneous resources and transforms the rigid, inflexible infrastructure into a simple and unified manageable set of elements in the virtualized environment. With vSphere, IT resources can be managed like a shared utility and quickly provisioned to different business units and projects without worrying about the underlying hardware differences and limitations.

Many people might have had earlier experience with VMware’s virtualization products in the form of VMware Workstation or VMware Server. VMware vSphere ESXi is quite different from other VMware products. It runs directly on the hardware. It is considered a bare-metal solution, offering a mainframe-class virtualization software platform that enables the deployment of multiple, secure, independent virtual machines on a single physical server.

VMware vSphere ESXi allows several instances of operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat, SuSE Linux, Mac OS, and more, to run in partitions that are independent of one another. Therefore, this technology is a key software enabler for server consolidation. You can move existing, unmodified applications and operating system environments from many older systems onto a few new high-performance System x platforms.

Real cost savings can be achieved by reducing the number of physical systems to manage. Reducing the number of systems saves floor space and rack space and reduces power consumption. It eliminates the headaches that are associated with consolidating dissimilar operating systems and applications that require their own OS instance.

The architecture of VMware vSphere ESXi is shown in Figure 1-1 on page 7.

VMware vSphere ESXi and vSphere vCenter Server help you to build cost-effective, high-availability solutions by using failover clustering between virtual machines. Until now, system partitioning (the ability of one server to run multiple operating systems instances simultaneously) has been the domain of mainframes and other large midrange servers. But with VMware vSphere products, dynamic logical partitioning can be enabled on IBM System x systems.

Instead of deploying multiple servers that are scattered around a company and running a single application on each server, the servers can be consolidated physically and simultaneously enhance system availability. VMware Hypervisor (vSphere ESXi) allows to each server to run multiple operating systems and applications in virtual machines, providing centralized IT management. Because these virtual machines are isolated from the other machines, if one machine fails, it does not affect the others. Not only is VMware ESXi software great for optimizing hardware usage, it can also offer the added benefits of higher availability and scalability.

A storage area network (SAN) is a highly effective solution for supporting and provisioning VMware products. SAN configuration requires careful consideration of components, including host bus adapters (HBAs) on the host servers, SAN switches, storage processors, disks, and storage disk arrays. A SAN topology has at least one switch present to form a SAN fabric. SAN can provide high-performance characteristics and feature functions, such as FlashCopy, Volumecopy and mirroring.

By using SAN with VMware vSphere, you can improve data accessibility and system recovery.

Using SAN with VMware vSphere also offers these benefits:

The transportability and encapsulation of VMware virtual machines complement the shared nature of SAN storage. When virtual machines are on SAN-based storage, you can shut down a virtual machine on one server and power it up on another server. Or, you can suspend it on one server and resume operation on another server on the same network in a matter of minutes. With this ability, you can migrate computing resources and maintain consistent shared access.

Using VMware vSphere with SAN is effective for the following tasks:

vStorage APIs for Data Protection are the next generation of VMware’s data protection framework that enables backup products to perform centralized, efficient, off-host LAN-free backup of vSphere virtual machines. This feature was introduced with vSphere 4.0 to replace the old backup integrated solution, which was known as VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB).

The schema for VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection is shown in Figure 1-2.

With vStorage APIs for Data Protection you can perform these tasks:

Centralized Virtual Machine Backup helps you eliminate backup traffic from your network to improve the performance of production virtual machines:

vStorage APIs for Data Protection leverage the snapshot capabilities of VMware vStorage VMFS to enable backup across SAN without requiring downtime for virtual machines. As a result, backups can be performed non-disruptively at any time of day without requiring extended backup windows and the application and user downtime that is associated with backup windows.

vStorage APIs for Data Protection are designed for all editions of vSphere. It is supported by many backup products, such as IBM Tivoli Storage managerSM, Symantec NetBackup, CA ArcServe, and VizionCore vRanger, among others.

For additional information, see the following web location:

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) provides business continuity and disaster recovery protection for virtual environments. Protection can extend from individual replicated datastores to an entire virtual site. VMware’s virtualization of the data center offers advantages that can be applied to business continuity and disaster recovery.

The entire state of a virtual machine (memory, disk images, I/O, and device state) is encapsulated. Encapsulation enables the state of a virtual machine to be saved to a file. Saving the state of a virtual machine to a file allows the transfer of an entire virtual machine to another host.

Hardware independence eliminates the need for a complete replication of hardware at the recovery site. Hardware that is running VMware vSphere ESXi server at one site can provide business continuity and disaster recovery protection for hardware that is running VMware vSphere ESXi server at another site. This capability eliminates the cost of purchasing and maintaining a system that sits idle until disaster strikes.

Hardware independence allows an image of the system at the protected site to boot from disk at the recovery site in minutes or hours instead of days.

vCenter Site Recovery Manager leverages array-based replication between a primary site and recovery site, such as the IBM DS Enhanced Remote Mirroring (ERM) functionality. The workflow that is built into SRM automatically discovers which datastores are set up for replication between the protected and recovery sites. SRM can be configured to support bidirectional protection between two sites.

vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides protection for the operating systems and applications that are encapsulated by the virtual machines that are running on VMware vSphere ESX Servers.

A vCenter Site Recovery Manager server must be installed at the protected site and at the recovery site. The protected and recovery sites must be managed by their own vCenter Server. The SRM server uses the extensibility of the vCenter Server to provide:

The architecture of a vCenter Site Recovery Manager environment is shown in Figure 1-3.

vCenter Site Recovery Manager has the following prerequisites:

For additional information, see the following website:

For more detailed information, visit the IBM DS Series Portal, which contains updated product materials and guides:

For more information about the VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, see Chapter 8, “VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM5) implementation” on page 179.