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Maximize VMware ROI HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage for VMware vSphere
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Virtual servers demand modern storage VMware vSphere is a leading virtualization platform, capable of transforming your data center into a dramatically simplified cloud infrastructure that is ready to drive the next generation of flexible and reliable IT services. But these transformative results depend on a highly agile and efficient storage infrastructure. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage is a next-generation storage platform designed to maximize the benefits of server and client. Transform your business Server virtualization delivers cost savings, efficiency gains, and increased service levels that are transforming not only data centers, but also your business.
Don’t let your storage hold you back Traditional enterprise storage has failed to keep up with the demands of server virtualization, making scaling VMware vSphere cost-prohibitive and detracting from the core benefits promised by server virtualization. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage is a next-generation storage platform designed to address the challenges of server virtualization and maximize return on investment (ROI) for VMware vSphere. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage features a modern storage architecture that is built from the ground up to enhance the benefits of VMware vSphere by exceeding the demands that server virtualization places on the storage infrastructure. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage combines highly-virtualized, autonomically-managed, and dynamically-tiered storage with advanced internal virtualization capabilities to increase administrative efficiency, system utilization, and storage performance. As a result, HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage boosts VMware vSphere ROI by enabling you to optimize your data center infrastructure, simplify storage administration, and maximize virtualization savings.
“A virtual infrastructure is only as strong as its weakest link. More often than not, that weakest link is storage.” –Source: “Taneja Group”
The challenges associated with virtualization Virtual Machines (VMs) may run on servers but they live on storage which serves as the foundation of a virtualized environment. A VM will only operate as fast as the speed of the slowest resources and storage can become the anchor that limits performance. Available storage resources will dictate your overall VM density and a shortage of storage resources will prevent you from fully utilizing host compute resources.
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HPE 3PAR StoreServ: The Fiber Channel reference platform for VVols VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) is a new storage architecture in vSphere 6 that enables VM-level granularity and finer control of storage resources. HPE is one of a select number of original design partners working closely with VMware to define, develop, and test the VVols architecture, with HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage serving as the Fiber Channel (FC) reference platform for this project. HPE’s early in-depth collaboration with VMware on the VVols architecture ensures that HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage customers benefit from the best VVols experience possible and one that is aligned with the modern storage architecture delivered by HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage arrays.
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The reason that storage is such a critical part of a virtual environment is that it is the only resource that is not local to a host, it is shared by many hosts and it is historically the slowest resource when compared to other resources such as CPU & memory. This combined with the I/O blender effect from many VMs with different and diverse workloads all being mixed together can place extreme stress on a storage array. As a result having the wrong storage architecture can create challenges and roadblocks to success with virtualization. There are many challenges associated with storage in a virtualized environment, and those challenges directly translate to impacts in the enterprise as shown below. Challenge
Impacts
Need
Performance bottlenecks
• Lost productivity • Failed SLAs • Non-virtualized Tier-1 apps
Predictable, scalable, no bottlenecks
Management complexities
• Too many tools • Lower productivity • Costly mistakes
Simple mgmt, end-end visibility
Availability and BC/DR
• Failed SLAs • Non-virtualized Tier-1 apps • Costly downtime
VMs must stay online during failures
Cost and efficiency
• Increased costs from VM Sprawl • Lower VM density • Un-desirable ROI
Capacity limitations
• Always buying more disk • Poor utilization • Wasted storage
High utilization low opex
Highly efficient thin technologies
Because of these challenges the needs for storage in a virtualized environment to overcome these challenges are quite clear. Let’s take a look at how 3PAR StoreServ can help you in each of these challenge areas.
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Go All-flash: Affordable Speed for Any Demand The HPE 3PAR StoreServ family of flash-optimized data storage systems modernize your data center to instantly handle inconsistent workloads with 99.9999 percent data availability. Get rapid and automated provisioning, multi-tenant design, hardware-accelerated deduplication and sub-1ms latency—all within a single tier-1 storage architecture. Now all-flash data storage costs the same as HDDs, so you get all that performance, scalability, simplicity and adaptability at a fraction of the cost, starting at just $19k. That’s all-flash, no limits.
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Overcoming performance challenges Scaling virtual server environments to achieve higher levels of consolidation and cost savings increases pressure on storage resources which in turn creates a performance bottleneck that effectively limits the number of VMs that can be provisioned on a single physical server. Performance bottlenecks can lead to wasted time and lost productivity due to storage slowing down your users and applications. This can also lead to not meeting SLAs and expectation set by the business as well as a reluctance to virtualize Tier-1 application which can limit the flexibility of your environment. To eliminate performance bottlenecks storage must be able to provide consistent and predictable performance to handle the I/O blender effect from many VMs. It also must be able to easily scale as needed without disrupting the environment. The key to solving performance challenges lies in having the right architecture and features designed specifically to support virtualization. HPE 3PAR StoreServ can help you overcome performance challenges in the following ways: • Achieve consistent performance—Wide striping distributes each vSphere storage volume across all array resources, leveraging the system’s fine-grained virtualization to deliver superior performance. Wide striping provides for consistent levels of performance, regardless of the capacity utilization of the array. This is not the case with traditional enterprise storage. • Seamlessly support the VMware “IO Blender”—Mixed workload support enables different types of applications requiring both transaction-based and throughput-intensive workloads to run without contention on a single system. Mixed workload support is especially important in consolidated and virtualized environments, since they require a single array to reliably support a wide mix of application types across the cluster while delivering high performance levels. • Leverage every storage resource equally—Mesh-active clustering of controllers distributes and dynamically balances each workload across all drives, nodes, loops, cache, and ports. Each volume is active on every controller in the array at all times, resulting in better performance and simplified management for a set of virtualized applications. • Integration with VMware VAAI—Enables HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage support for advanced storage operations that come with VMware’s vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). These operations improve virtual infrastructure performance and enables greater VM scalability and density by offloading resource intensive storage operations to the storage array. 3PAR StoreServ supports all VMware VAAI primitives including Hardware Assisted Locking, with the 3PAR ASIC metadata comparisons are executed in silicon, further improving performance in the largest, most demanding vSphere environments. • Integration with VMware Adaptive Queue Depth Throttling—Minimizes the impact of I/O congestion. This capability allows you to increase the number of VMs per physical server and add higher-performing applications to your physical servers when attached to HPE 3PAR StoreServ arrays.
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• Guarantee resources for critical VMs—HPE 3PAR Priority Optimization software ensures high priority VMs receive the necessary storage resources when they need them. HPE 3PAR Priority Optimization complements host-side storage resource controls—such as Storage I/O Control, Adaptive Queue Depth and Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler—that are built into vSphere. By combining host-side and storage-side QoS controls I/O resources can be managed on multiple levels to make the most efficient use of physical storage assets and help guarantee critical workloads can meet required service levels. • Increase agility and minimize risk—HPE 3PAR Adaptive Optimization Software is a granular, policy-driven, autonomic storage tiering software solution that delivers service-level optimization for enterprises and cloud data centers at the lowest possible cost, while increasing agility and minimizing risk. HPE 3PAR Adaptive Optimization Software delivers the right QoS for virtual machines at the right time, by leveraging the proven sub-volume data movement engine built into the HPE 3PAR OS. As a result, service levels are autonomically preserved for applications running in the VM.
Overcoming availability challenges: reduce the risk of downtime from storage failures An infrastructure designed to optimize the benefits of virtualization must do more than just remove storage performance bottlenecks. In highly consolidated environments, the impact from a single failure affects more applications and users. To get the most out of your virtualization deployment, it is necessary to increase reliability and resiliency in addition to performance. In combination, these two benefits enable more VMs to be placed onto physical servers for greater virtualization ROI. Storage is the biggest single point of failure in a virtual environment and any storage downtime can have big impacts and be costly. Lack of faith in their storage is one of the biggest reasons that companies are reluctant to virtualize Tier-1 apps which limits the benefits of virtualization and reduces their ROI on the investment in it. Companies also need to look at changing and adding recovery options when virtualizing to ensure that their business can survive any type of failure and be back up and running as soon as possible.
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To eliminate availability concerns storage must be resilient enough to handle any failures without causing downtime and also provide a way to seamlessly recover from any type of failure. HPE 3PAR StoreServ can help you overcome availability challenges in the following ways: • Recover faster with multi-site high availability—Continuous storage protection with a multi-site vSphere environment breaks the boundaries of storage to achieve high availability with a multi-site VMware environment using HPE 3PAR StoreServ Peer Persistence. Certified for vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC), this solution allows hosts, VMs, and data to move freely across data centers without impacting your business applications. Now you can implement a true cloud solution where storage resources are shared across data centers and are not constrained by their physical boundaries. HPE 3PAR Peer Persistence software enables 3PAR StoreServ systems located in different data centers at metropolitan distances to act as peers to each other, presenting continuous storage system access to hosts and servers connected to them. This capability allows you to configure a high-availability solution between two sites or data centers where storage access failover and failback remains completely transparent to the hosts and applications running on those hosts. • Take resiliency to the next level—HPE 3PAR Persistent Cache software does for the HPE 3PAR Controller Node cluster what VMware Fault Tolerance does for vSphere clusters, bringing an ultra-high level of resiliency to consolidated environments. HPE 3PAR Persistent Cache software allows Always-On application and virtual server environments to gracefully handle an unplanned controller failure without the substantial performance penalties associated with traditional arrays and “write-through” mode. • Get simple, reliable, end-to-end disaster recovery for VMware vSphere environments—HPE 3PAR Replication Adapter Software for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager integrates HPE 3PAR Remote Copy Software with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager for automated disaster recovery management; you can protect applications seamlessly and effectively without duplicating disaster recovery investments in the storage and server layers. • Get the performance of snapshots secured with protection of backups—HPE StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central (RMC) for VMware software integrates HPE 3PAR StoreServ primary storage with HPE StoreOnce Backup Systems to provide a converged availability and flat backup service for VMware environments that augments traditional backup approaches. Combining the performance of local and remote snapshots with the protection of backups, StoreOnce RMC for VMware enables fast, efficient, reliable, and simple protection for VMware virtual machine disks (VMDKs) and data stores. HPE StoreOnce RMC for VMware allows VMware administrators to create hundreds of non-disruptive, application consistent VM snapshots and initiate rapid online recovery. HPE StoreOnce RMC for VMware flat backup allows VM snapshot data to be automatically backed up directly from HPE 3PAR StoreServ to StoreOnce. Flat backup with StoreOnce RMC delivers up to 17X faster backups and up to 5X faster restores than traditional backup methods. And all of this can be monitored and managed directly from within the VMware vCenter management user interface.
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Overcoming management challenges: spend less time managing storage1 Traditional storage provisioning is based on the physical dedication of resources in mainframe and client-server computing paradigms—a legacy that continues to carry forward the root inefficiencies and inflexibilities that virtual environments were designed to overcome. Inefficiency and inflexibility are particularly detrimental to virtual server environments, where platform rigidity and provisioning complexity can lead to routine overprovisioning that detracts from storage utilization and diminishes server virtualization ROI. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage offers the simplest administration of any storage platform available, allowing you to greatly reduce provisioning and management time. In addition, several HPE 3PAR Storage features uniquely simplify administration of VMware vSphere environments by enhancing visibility into storage resources and offering superior granularity and control over snapshots and rapid online recovery. 3PAR StoreServ can help you overcome availability challenges in the following ways: • Enable automated provisioning and policy-based management—With support for VMware VVols and Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) built within the HPE 3PAR StoreServ Operating System, common storage management tasks like LUN provisioning and management are greatly simplified. With VVols, any 3PAR StoreServ feature that is supported with VVols can now be implemented at the individual VM level to provide the best possible efficiency and control of storage resources. Your applications directly benefit from this new, fine-grain level of interaction with critical storage resources. By using policies to automatically provision LUNs at the time of VM creation, no pre-provisioning of datastores is required and administrative costs are reduced by eliminating tedious tasks. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage offers the flexibility of being a single storage container for a vSphere administrator to manage and track.
VVols enable VM-level granularity of array features VVols enables array storage features to be applied to specific VMs
With VMFS array storage features can only be applied to entire LUNs VMFS Datastore
VVols Storage Container
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VM
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Array has no visibility into VMFS
1
Internal HPE testing
Array can see VMs as objects
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Provides true convergence of block, file, and object access on a single storage device Unlike established unified and multi-protocol systems, 3PAR StoreServ with the default Block Persona and optional File Persona does not create inflexible capacity groups between block and file, or require you to run server workloads that are best served by block storage such as virtualization, databases, and applications over file protocols which are actually best today for client workloads. Instead, you get a truly converged solution with truly converged controllers, truly agile capacity, and truly unified management that is both flash optimized and built to address a broad spectrum of server and client workloads.
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• Provision faster and more reliably—HPE 3PAR Autonomic Groups are a feature of the HPE 3PAR Operating System (OS) that makes provisioning HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage in clustered and virtual server environments even faster, simpler, and more reliable. HPE 3PAR Autonomic Groups eliminate tedious manual repetition of commands and reduce the number of commands required to provision storage with VMware vSphere from 50 to three for a five-server cluster. With the HPE 3PAR Autonomic Groups feature, three clicks and 60 seconds are all you need to fully create and provision multiple volumes to multiple virtual servers—the same process that can consume hours or even days with traditional storage. • Manage from a single-pane-of-glass—HPE StoreFront Analytics for vRealize Operations Manager extends vRealize Operations Manager functionality to support HPE 3PAR StoreServ arrays. vSphere administrators using HPE StoreFront Analytics can visualize and analyze data from their HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage array on standard and custom dashboards directly within vRealize Operations Manager without the need to switch to another tool. HPE StoreFront Analytics provides you with operational dashboards to gain deep insights and visibility into the health, risk, and efficiency of your storage infrastructure. In addition, StoreFront Analytics Content Pack for vRealize Log Insight provides analytics capabilities to unstructured data and log management so you gain operational intelligence and deep visibility across all tiers of your IT infrastructure and applications. • Get better visibility and insight—HPE OneView Storage Module Plug-in for VMware vCenter Server gives administrators enhanced visibility into storage resources and precise insight into the way that individual VMs are mapped to datastores and individual system volumes. Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics for individual storage volumes—such as RAID level, subsystem failure protection level, drive type, and volume type—are displayed within the VMware vCenter Server virtualization management console, reducing administration time and improving clarity across VM-to-datastore-to-storage abstraction layers.
Overcoming capacity and efficiency challenges: cut storage total cost of ownership by up to 50 percent Every customer is sensitive to cost, the initial investment in virtualization can be costly and to achieve the full return on that investment a virtual environment must be as efficient as possible. As a virtual environment grows, improper storage can limit VM density and lead to reduced efficiency and wasted resources which reduce ROI and increases TCO. Virtual environments are always growing and storage that is inefficient can lead to constantly having to add additional capacity. You also need to be able to reclaim space as VMs are constantly moving in a virtual environment, in addition any VMs that are deleted need to be cleaned up. Not being able to reclaim this space and greatly reduce storage array efficiency.
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To reduce costs and increase efficiency storage must be as efficient as possible and achieve as high utilization as possible with low operational overhead. To overcome capacity limitations storage must be equipped with highly efficient thin and data reduction technologies that can reduce capacity requirements and maintain as small a capacity foot print as possible. 3PAR StoreServ can help you overcome capacity and efficiency challenges in the following ways: • Eliminate over-provisioning and automatically reclaim space—Support for VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) eliminates the need to pre-provision large datastores, a common practice of storage admins in the past when using VMFS. VVols enable the automatic provisioning of HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage on an as-needed, on-demand basis during the creation of a virtual machine (VM) from within vCenter Server. This integration lightens the tasks placed on the storage administrator and empowers the vSphere administrator to take responsibility for VM and storage provisioning. Administration of the VVols with HPE 3PAR is simple and enables efficiency in day-to-day operations. With VVols 3PAR StoreServ becomes VM-aware and as a result automatic space reclamation is now possible when VMs are deleted or moved which ensures that no space is wasted and the array maintains a thin footprint. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage also enables deployment and restoration of array-based snapshots on a per-VM basis to a disk tier different from the production data, which helps save valuable capacity. • Get thin and stay thin—Thin Provisioning Block Reclaim is a vSphere VAAI feature that enables a storage array to reclaim stranded space on Thin Provisioned datastores. Using the UNMAP command, any disk blocks that contain data from previously deleted or migrated VMs can be reclaimed to provide more usable storage space. This feature can greatly improve the efficiency of Thin Provisioning and allow you to minimize disk space usage. VAAI integration enables space reclamation that releases allocated but unused storage capacity assigned to a LUN back to the array which drives greater storage capacity savings. • Zero blocks with zero effort—Block Zero is a vSphere feature that offloads large, block-level write operations of zeros from virtual servers to the HPE 3PAR StoreServ array, boosting efficiency during several common vSphere operations, including the initialization of Eager Zeroed Thick virtual disks and the allocation of new file blocks for thin provisioned virtual disks. With HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage support for VAAI, these data movement and write operations now have “zero cost,” which frees valuable server, storage, and network resources so you can increase both VM performance and density. The built-in zero-detection capability of the HPE 3PAR ASIC allows users to create Eager Zeroed Thick VMDKs that do not consume physical capacity for the storage blocks that are “zeroed” at initialization. As the vSphere host writes zeros to the VMDK file, the zeros are detected in-line by the HPE 3PAR ASIC, so no space is allocated for the VMDK in the thin provisioned volume. On other storage platforms, Eager Zeroed Thick virtual disks write zeros across the entire VMDK file at the time it is created, meaning the full size of the VMDK is reserved on the storage array before the VM is ever used.
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HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage delivers the following unique benefits to maximize client virtualization ROI: • High performance to meet peak demands due to boot storms, virus scans, and login storms • Simplified management, including rapid storage provisioning and automation, to eliminate repetitive tasks • Low deployment costs, since hundreds of virtual servers and thousands of virtual clients can • be consolidated onto a single array without tradeoffs • Capacity efficiency over time, due to unique space reclamation technologies • Policy-driven, autonomic storage tiering to optimize costs and performance
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• Reduce capacity requirements and waste—HPE 3PAR Thin Provisioning provides the desired exported capacity that VMware vSphere recommends, without compromising written utilization. This means less capacity to purchase up front; less capacity to house, power, and cool over the long term; and no more waste. HPE 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software enables you to allocate as much logical capacity to a VMware VMFS volume as needed over the lifetime of that volume, without actually dedicating any physical capacity up front. Physical capacity is allocated seamlessly, on an as-needed basis, and is consumed only when vSphere writes to the thin provisioned storage volume. There is no wasted capacity presented to the vSphere host. In addition, VAAI integration enables autonomic space reclamation for thin provisioned volumes, so your storage stays thin over time without increasing your management burden. • Deploy more VMs on the same storage—HPE 3PAR Thin Conversion software gives you the ability to “get thin” by using the platform’s unique thin engine to eliminate data center waste and by allowing you to deploy a larger number of VMs in your consolidated environment. With HPE 3PAR Thin Conversion software, you can convert traditional “fat” volumes from other storage platforms to more efficient “thin” volumes, so you can boost VMware ROI by purchasing and maintaining 50 percent less storage capacity. • Reduce storage capacity requirements—HPE 3PAR Fast RAID Technologies offer ASICaccelerated RAID levels that deliver performance approaching that of RAID 1, but with 66 percent less RAID capacity overhead. This unique capability reduces storage capacity requirements for VMware deployments, without significantly impacting performance.
Client virtualization The same architectural advantages and advanced features that make HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage the ideal platform for server virtualization apply to desktop virtualization as well. However, client virtualization places the storage infrastructure directly in the critical path for thousands of end users, and therefore introduces a number of unique challenges with respect to delivering consistently high performance, minimizing management costs, lowering deployment costs, and maintaining capacity efficiency over time. For this reason, the storage platform you choose is critical to making the economics of client virtualization work while maintaining high quality of service levels to satisfy user requirements.
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HPE ConvergedSystem 700 for Virtualization While virtualization increases IT agility, it introduces a challenge of its own: complexity. Deploying a virtualized environment requires significant resource investments. HPE helps organizations overcome this barrier with HPE ConvergedSystem 700 for VMware using HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage. The HPE ConvergedSystem 700 for Virtualization with support for VMware is designed for ease of use and simplicity to help you quickly harness the full potential of virtualization. It is a pre-integrated, pre-configured, and modular system providing a secure and reliable data-center-in-a-box experience. This turn-key solution is built on standard and reliable modular HPE infrastructure blocks including blade-based servers and an HPE 3PAR 7200 Storage array. The expansion option allows the base system to be expanded in increments of four blade servers with 256 GB of memory and 36 x 300 GB 15k drives. The system can support three expansion kits, which allow 16 blade servers and 144 drives to be installed.
Get more out of VMware vSphere When deployed together, highly virtualized HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and server virtualization from VMware deployed on HPE server blades deliver a compelling utility computing solution. This combination boosts server virtualization ROI and increases the agility of your organization by making it easy for you to build a highly scalable virtual data center that serves more applications with fewer hardware and management resources.
Learn more at
hp.com/go/storage/vmware hp.com/go/convergedsystems
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