How SMBs Can Fit the Purchase of a Shared Storage Device into Their Budget – VMware vSphere Storage Appliance

I thought I would share an article I came across by Jeff Eberhand on the VMware SMB blog discussing a cost efficient solution for SMBs to take advantage of shared storage in a small scale virtual infrastructure, without the high overhead of a SAN using vSphere Storage Appliance. 

A VSA VM runs on each host in the cluster (up to 3 hosts), acting as the pass-through device to the hard drives on each host.  It then sets up a type of NFS mirroring across each host to make sure your data is online and available, even in the event of a host crashing or needing maintenance.

Jeff even quoted out a deployment and the price point is defiantly something of taking note with small customers and getting them on the proper path to virtualization.

You can read the whole story here.

The SMB’s Guide to Storage Virtualization

I recently upgraded our organizations 4 year old Compellent SAN infrastructure (now Dell) to a NetApp FAS2240 (which I recommend all SMBs should check out, completely exceed my expectations) at my companies Data Center.

The process of evaluating and deploying an upgrade to our storage infrastructure was a painless process for us due to the fact that prior to my time as Director of IT at Western Precooling I worked at a VAR for 4 years so I had a lot of previous exposure to SAN technology already.

For a lot of SMB IT Directors and Mangers new to storage technology as virtualization makes its way down into the market space, it can be a very intimidating and daunting task to get a high level grasp on what is the best solution and the best specifications for a storage solution for your organizations environment.

Though about 2 years outdated, check out The SMB's Guide to Storage Virtualization. Some of the content has changed, but I still think it is a relevant guide for SMB IT beginners to get their heads wrapped around on where to begin the pre-analysis process for their management.

Included is a nice basic checklist to know to get your brain gears started::

• Connectivity: Fibre channel is fast, but iSCSI and NFS are much less expensive per port.
• Number of drives: The more drives serving data in an array, the better the throughput.
• Drive type: SATA drives offer a lot of space at an attractive price, but SAS drives outperform.
• Don’t shop by usable space: Simply selecting
a product to meet the size requirements will
not address performance and scalability for virtualization.
• Hypervisor compatibility: Each product has a wide array of supported devices to run virtual machines. Hyper-V via Windows Server 2008 will have the broadest support, followed by vSphere and XenServer. 

You can download the guide here.