New Trends In The World Of Servers And Virtualization

While server virtualization is a technology that reached its maturity several years ago, the industry is continuing to evolve. Keeping up with the latest trends is beneficial for your business since software-defined infrastructure and hyper-converged solutions like VMware vSAN  http://polackalkudumbam.com/rethinking-cloud-storage-with-vsan/ are predicted to dominate the market over the next few years. These solutions can offer enhanced security and scalability for a lower price compared to traditional physical servers. Let’s take a look at server and virtualization trends that will define the market in 2022 and beyond.

Virtualization Solutions Market Continues To Evolve

 The last decade was the decade of virtualization. This trend completely dominated the niche of enterprise data centers. And while there’s been little growth in terms of new license revenues because the market has matured, virtualization is not outdated, contrary to what the skeptics might think.

According to experts, the global server virtualization market will reach $10 billion in 2026. The driving forces behind market growth are the Covid-19 pandemic that forced many companies to reduce operating costs by moving to the cloud and decreasing prices for hyper-converged solutions.

It also means that the demand for skilled workers who specialize in storage and networking and have experience with HCI will continue to grow. The biggest advantage of hyper-converged systems is their lack of need for specialized hardware and purpose-built networks. This not only reduces the operating costs of businesses but allows employers to retrain their IT talent easily instead of hiring fresh staff. HCI will continue to be the main growth driver in the server virtualization industry.

Hybrid Cloud Becomes the Go-to Option

Businesses increasingly rely on hybrid cloud solutions to improve their infrastructure reliability and avoid vendor lock-in. Hybrid cloud tech is the hottest trend for large enterprises that are looking for on-the-fly scalability and reduced overhead costs. Ordering a mix of private and public cloud infrastructure in a single package is very appealing to companies large and small. There are many startups that offer to create personalized packages, and even large providers like Amazon Web Services already entice customers with a hybrid cloud option.

Bare Metal Servers Are Here To Stay

 Despite virtualization and cloud computing being the most popular options for a variety of customers, bare-metal infrastructure is not going the way of the dinosaur. Dedicated bare-metal servers retain their appeal for less tech-savvy customers (virtualized servers can be too complicated to manage). The niche of low-cost commercial-grade servers is even predicted to expand in the next few years. Customers usually choose dedicated bare metal servers if they are looking for reliable website hosting and private cloud computing.

Server Virtualization Has Matured

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought a lot of changes to the workplace and day-to-day business operations. Companies increasingly rely on remote work and http://testing.stuccoitaliano.Com/forum/Profile/Jasperbullock41/ cloud solutions. A reliable mix of traditional computing, cloud infrastructure, and soulntech.com virtualization has become the default option for companies that are looking to survive and even thrive in the new environment.

Providers of these solutions including various VMware products, Hyper-V, KVM, and OpenStack technologies are consolidating their market presence. Industry leaders like IBM, VMware, Microsoft, and Cisco report growing demand for their server virtualization products.

Virtualization solutions extend beyond servers. More and more users are switching from hardware options to virtualization in networks, data, storage, and even desktops. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a popular option due to remote work becoming more common.

Cybercrime Is on the Rise

 Cyberattacks on businesses and government entities are becoming more common and sophisticated. Due to reliance on remote work enterprise networks have become more vulnerable to various intrusion techniques and social engineering attempts. Data centers and server providers team up with security experts to handle these challenges. Companies are switching to zero trust platforms and adopting the Extended Detection and Response (XDR) paradigm that simplifies cybersecurity by providing disk encryption, device control, firewalls, and other options as a combined solution.

Increasing Demand for Edge Computing

 Switching to remote work and extensive growth of the IoT sector have increased the demand https://www.friendscampus.com/community/profile/alizageorg5772/ for edge computing. The traditional computing model is based on gathering data from different sources and then processing it on a remote server. With edge computing, every device close to a data source can become a local node and handle extensive calculations. This approach reduces response times and improves network security and reliability.

Edge Computing Predictions:

• Edge computing will see increased adoption in logistics and retail.
• Sensors, electronics logs, and other low-cost IoT devices will come with some computing ability.
• Experts consider Edge to be the next technological frontier and expect major breakthroughs in the coming decade.
• The adoption of 5G will improve the performance of Edge networks and bring down operating costs.
• According to experts, 75% of all data generated by medium-sized and large companies will be processed using Edge computing by 2025.

Conclusion

The industry is continuing to evolve and enterprises have to adopt the latest trends to stay competitive. Using virtualization is a great option for companies looking to reduce operating costs and enhance the security and reliability of their networks. Entrepreneurs shouldn’t ignore the growing threat of cyberattacks. Businesses that are trying to capitalize on emerging trends should look into Edge computing.

vSAN Operations Guide: Managing Fault Domains

If your vSAN cluster includes several racks or blade server enclosures, fault domains let you safeguard against rack or enclosure failure. Fault domains can be formed, and each fault domain can have one or more hosts.

One or more virtual SAN https://Pendantquetulaimes.com/forum/profile/jaredmeisel2006/ nodes are classified into the fault domain according to where they are physically located in the data center. When properly set up, fault domains allow VSANs to endure both host, capacity device, network connection, and network switch failures as well as the failure of whole physical racks.

The number of failures that the VM permits determine the primary degree of permissible policy failures for a cluster. If the basic fault tolerance level is set to 1 (PFTT=1) while configuring the VM, vSAN will let a single failure of any kind affect any component inside the fault domain, https://www.everycarehants.co.uk along with the failure of the entire rack.

Replicas and witnesses are deployed in various fault domains when you set the rack fault domains and assign a new virtual machine. For instance, vSAN needs at least 2*n+1 fault domains in the cluster if the primary fault tolerance level is set to N (PFTT=n) in the VM storage policy. This strategy places copies of the corresponding virtual machine objects in different racks when virtual machines are deployed in a cluster with failure domains.

To support PFTT=1, at least 3 fault domains are needed. Configure the cluster with four fault domains or more for the best results. Similar restrictions apply to a cluster with 3 fault domains as they do to a cluster with three nodes, such as the inability to fully utilize data migration mode or to re-protect data after a failure.

Imagine that you have a vSAN cluster with 16 hosts. There are four hosts per rack, therefore the hosts are divided over the four racks. Make a failure domain for each rack so that it is possible for the entire unit to fail. A cluster with this capacity may be configured by assigning the “Basic Level of Acceptable Failures” option to 1. Set up five failure domains in the cluster if you need the “Basic Level of Acceptable Failures” option to be set to 2.

All assets, namely CPU and rack memory, are inaccessible to the cluster when a rack fails. Configure more compact fault domains to lessen the effect of a probable rack failure. The total quantity of resources available in the cluster following a rack failure rises as the number of fault domains grows.

Follow these principles while working with fault domains:

• Set up a minimum of three fault domains for the vSAN cluster. Configure 4 or more fault domains for the best results.
• A node that is not a part of any fault domain is thought to be in a fault domain all on its own.
• Each vSAN host does not need to be assigned to a failure domain. Consider making fault domains that are the same size if you employ fault domains to defend the vSAN environment.
• vSAN nodes save their failure domain designations when switching to another cluster.
• Set the same number of devices within every fault domain when constructing one.
• The failure domain can contain any number of hosts. At a minimum, one host must be present in every failure domain.

Create a New Fault Domain in a vSAN Cluster

You can arrange hosts in various fault domains to make sure that virtual machine objects keep functioning normally even if a rack fails.

vSAN distributes protection elements, such as witnesses and clones of the virtual machine objects, across various fault domains when you deploy a VM on the cluster with fault domains. As a result, in addition to supporting a single host, setiadigital.com hard disk, or network failure, the vSAN system can now tolerate complete rack failures.

1. Navigate to the vSAN Cluster
2. Click the Settings tab
3. Under vSAN, click Fault Domains
4. Click the plus icon. The Create Fault Domain Wizard opens
5. Enter the name of the fault domain
6. Select one or more hosts to add to the fault domain
7. Click Create

The fault domain contains the chosen hosts. Information about the capacity that is consumed and reserved is displayed for each failure domain. You may see the capacity distribution in the fault domain by doing this.

Move host to selected fault domain

You can move a host to a chosen fault domain in a vSAN cluster.

1. Navigate to the vSAN Cluster
2. Click the Settings tab
3. Under vSAN, click Fault Domains
4. Click and drag the host you want to add to an existing fault domain

The selected host will appear in the fault domain

Move hosts out of the fault domain

You can relocate hosts away from a fault domain based on your needs.

But first, make sure the host is online because you cannot move offline or inaccessible hosts from the fault domain.

1. Navigate to the vSAN Cluster
2. Click the Settings tab
3. Under vSAN, click Fault Domains

The fault domain no longer includes the chosen host. Any host that isn’t included in a fault domain is said to be in a single-host fault domain.

Hosts can then be added to fault domains.

Fault domain rename

You can change the name of an existing fault domain in a vSAN cluster.

1. Navigate to the vSAN Cluster
2. Click the Settings tab
3. Under vSAN, click Fault Domains
4. Click “Apply” or “OK”

The new name will appear in the list of fault domains.

Remove selected fault domains

When you no longer need a fault domain, you can remove it from the vSAN cluster.

1. Navigate to the vSAN Cluster
2. Click the Settings tab
3. Under vSAN, click Fault Domains

All hosts in the fault domain are removed, and the selected fault domain is removed from the vSAN cluster. Each host not in a fault domain is believed to be in its own single-host fault domain.

Rethinking Cloud Storage with VSAN

With the popularity of big data analytics, data storage tools, and other modern technologies, the number of data volumes handled by businesses has grown significantly. However, handling terabytes of data isn’t that easy. As the number of data sources increases, not only do we need to store it in the right data source, but we also need to do it in the right form. 

In some cases, we also need to make sure data is encrypted before we can actually store it so that it’s not accessible for anyone who doesn’t need to see it. At the same time, as much as data is not a static but rather a dynamic thing, it needs to be accessible whenever we want. So you cannot think of data storage as a static concept. As a dynamic structure it needs to grow as time goes by. As you can see, there are many things to consider when deciding on cloud data storage.

Enter VSAN

VSAN (Virtual SAN or Virtual Storage Area Network) https://fsecan.ca/blog/index.php?entryid=305163 is a storage software appliance that aims to take the concept of VSS (virtual storage) to the next level. As this can best be understood from its name, VSAN uses VSS, and it stores the data in the same way as virtual machines do. But unlike VMs, VSAN gives us the option of selecting different data sources, different storage device types, and different storage formats. So how is VSAN different from a storage array?

An ordinary storage array stores data across several physical hard disks. This means that there can be only one set of disks, and you cannot access the data stored on those disks in a different location and using a different storage device. If one of your physical disks in your storage array dies, all the data that’s on that physical disk will go with it.

VSAN is different because it separates the data from the data sources, storage devices, and storage format. So, VSAN is a flexible and powerful tool that not only gives us options we could not have with a traditional storage array but also allows us to work with data in different ways depending on our requirements.

Where Is Data Stored?

But what exactly is a storage device? Is it a physical disk? What does it have to do with storage? Well, a storage device is a piece of hardware that you can use to store and retrieve data. It doesn’t have to be a physical disk, and it doesn’t even need to be a hard disk. In fact, VSAN supports multiple storage device types, including SSDs, SAN-based storage, and even network-based storage. With VSAN, we can store and access our data using different devices.

We don’t want to store all our data in one location and expect it to last forever. We want our data to be flexible, to be able to access it whenever we want to, https://mumsandmothers.com/Chat/profile/teddynilsen9467 and from anywhere in the world. The data also needs to be usable and accessible for as long as we need it to be. These were the things we were struggling with cloud storage. Datastores in the cloud have to deal with this flexibility and also with our needs in a practical way.

Benefits of Data Management

One of the things that’s most interesting about VSAN is that with it, you have complete control over your data. This is what gives VSAN its power. VSAN doesn’t depend on your choice of the service provider or data sources as it’s you who chooses what data to store. You decide how your data is to be structured and how you want to access it. All of this is under your control, and VSAN is like a blank canvas that can be used to do anything you want it to do.

You can choose to store your data in different data sources, different formats, and different data storage device types. This enables you to take complete control of your data as no one else can see or access it unless you allow them to. As VSAN gives you complete flexibility in storing your data, you can make the most of the available technology to get the maximum possible benefit. VSAN also presents replication and redundnacy features. If some of the disks fail on one server, an identical copy of data will be present on the other one.

With the use of tools like VSAN, you can also make use of existing infrastructure. You’re not restricted to using new hardware or new software and services as you can employ existing hardware and solutions to provide additional benefits. You’re also not bound by the limitations of traditional storage. The benefits of VSAN also extend to the data security front as you can encrypt your data at rest using different algorithms and https://stump.itempuniversity.com/ encrypt your data as it passes between the data sources and storage devices.

The benefits of VSAN also extend to the physical world as your data can be accessed using storage access products, storage virtualization software, or even storage network software. Your data is always protected and available to use, whether it’s for work or for play.

Is It Worth a Try?

When you think about what VSAN is, think about it as a data appliance that aims to give you flexibility and options that cloud storage doesn’t. There is also the added software-centric disaster resiatnce benefit. This approach to data storage also allows you to get the most out of the technology. With VSAN, you can also make better use of existing infrastructure to secure and access your data.

So when we think about data storage today, we need to make sure that our data storage is not only flexible and dynamic but also secure and accessible. VSAN is a storage software appliance that offers you the options you need to meet these requirements, and as a result, you can get the best out of existing infrastructure.

Software-Defined Storage Buying Guide

Earlier articles in this series have focused on the definition of Software-Defined Storage (SDS) as well as tips on how to implement it. Now we review some of the vendors involved, beginning with what the leading storage vendors are up to in this space. We’re also covering some of the challengers and startups who aim to shake things up in SDS.

Dell

Through acquisition and internal development, Dell has assembled an impressive array of storage technology over the past decade. Its SDS strategy hews closely to its core hardware competency. As such, it is partnering with SDS specialists and putting the emphasis on the delivery of a strong hardware platform that integrates well with the overlying SDS virtualization layer.

Dell’s focus is on validating and hardening multiple SDS stacks on Dell hardware as the company has found that most new hardware doesn’t work automatically with SDS software. Problems can range from the software not recognizing the new hardware to intermittent disk failures. It can also lead to poor visibility into hardware issues.

“We have been working closely with our SDS partners to harden the software stack to run on Dell servers,” said Chandra Mukhyala, SDS Solutions Manager, Dell Storage. “In the process, we came up with Hardware Compatibility Lists (HCLs) and optimized reference architectures for various workloads.”

Dell’s Blue Thunder initiative involves partnerships with other vendors to bring together a software-defined storage portfolio. This includes integrating its hardware with open source software as well as hypervisor and SDS vendors. This includes cooperation with VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, Nexenta and Red Hat. The Dell XC Series appliances, for example, are based on Dell PowerEdge servers combined with Nutanix software and Dell global services and support.

“The XC series offers customers a hyper-converged solution that integrates storage, hypervisor and compute into a single platform and, as a result, increases overall savings and decrease time-to-value,” said Mukhyala. “After announcing our OEM agreement with Nutanix last year and delivering our first appliances in November, we already began shipping the Dell XC Series Version 2.0 appliances this February with additional models and form factors.”

HP

HP Storage views software-defined storage as a hardware- and hypervisor-agnostic abstraction that provides both orchestration and data services. HP OneView provides a common orchestration layer between underlying storage and VMware, Microsoft, and Openstack environments. HP StoreVirtual VSA and HP StoreOnce VSA provide data services for primary storage and data protection.

As HP provides technology that embraces storage, networking and compute, it advocates hyper-convergence of all these elements. So it is looking well beyond SDS towards software-defined everything.

“Our customer base is rapidly embracing hyper-convergence with the HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual as a simple building block for virtualized environments,” said Dale Degen, HP Worldwide Software-Defined Storage Category Manager.

IBM

IBM is another company that is making a big SDS play. But unlike Dell, it has internally created a plethora of SDS and software virtualization components that it has pieced together to provide a unified software-defined front.

IBM focuses on the management of storage hardware and encompasses virtual, physical or in the cloud, socaflow.com said David Hill, an analyst at Mesabi Group. Its Spectrum Storage Family includes too many elements to lay out fully. Underlying much of it is IBM Virtual Storage Center (VSC), and there are various Spectrum products dealing with storage management, data protection (based on Tivoli Storage Manager), archiving (LTFS tape), SAN virtualization http://Soulntech.com/snt4_2/84222 (SAN Volume Controller), SDS (XIV software), and high performance NAS and object storage (GPFS file system). It’s a little complex but an impressive line-up of well-established components lies behind it. The goal is agility, control and efficiency.

“What IBM wants to convey is that a spectrum of complementary yet still separate products is needed in this increasingly diverse storage world,” said Hill. “An overlying theme that IBM weaves throughout the Spectrum Storage is the need for transformation of data economics including provisioning, utilization and management.”

EMC

EMC provides SDS solutions for scale-out SAN (ScaleIO), hyper-scale object, Hadoop HDFS analytics (Elastic Cloud Storage – ECS) and software defined management and automation solutions (ViPR SRM, ViPR Controller). These tools can manage a multi-vendor storage environment from one screen and provide an open API cloud orchestration layer for virtualized data centers, including a conduit to private and hybrid clouds. The individual components can be deployed independently, while ViPR delivers storage automation and an API for cloud integration.

ScaleIO is a software-defined, server-based storage area network (SAN) that converges storage and compute resources, and it can grow from a few to thousands of servers. ECS is a software-defined cloud storage platform that combines commodity infrastructure with traditional arrays. ViPR SRM is software-defined management software that enables IT to visualize storage relationships, analyze configurations and capacity growth, and optimize resources. ViPR Controller is automation software that centralizes multivendor storage.

“SDS is about addressing needs around performance, data management, and the end user experience and aligning the right data to these needs for the right cost,” said Suresh Sathyamurthy, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Emerging Technology Division, EMC. “In the end, it’s about greater flexibility, agility and vendor choice.”

NetApp

NetApp has invested heavily in its DataOnTap storage operating system so it makes sense that it would build its SDS approach on this solid foundation. For example, it released NetApp StorageGrid Webscale for object storage and integration of cloud applications with Amazon S3. It is said to be able to store up to 100 billion objects in one container that can be distributed in data centers spread around the planet.

“Leveraging 10 years of enterprise object-storage experience, StorageGRID Webscale provides a foundation for software-defined, globally distributed object stores with policies that enable IT to govern data placement and Https://Meiro.company/community/profile/antonlithgow187/ protection worldwide,” said Dan Neault, senior vice president, Data Center Solutions Group, NetApp.

DataCore

DataCore has probably been doing SDS longer than anyone. And it is reaping the benefits of increased awareness of the value of SDS. George Teixeira, the company’s CEO and President, said the result of this raised awareness was the fact that his company has now shipped over 25,000 copies of its software. DataCore has been playing the software-based tune for quite some time, and now it appears that it has struck gold.

DataCore promotes its long experience with storage virtualization and features such as automation that supports auto-discovery, load balancing, auto-tiering and self-healing. Its software-defined platform comprises two products; one for managing SAN/NAS and cloud storage (SANsymphony-V) and the other for hyper-converged storage (Virtual SAN). Since they are built on the same platform, they are integrated such that capacity can be shared across them.

“The platform has been developed to provide the highest levels of storage availability, performance and efficiency from a utilization and a management perspective,” said Teixeira.

In addition, DataCore is working with Huawei on a line of jointly certified hyper-converged solutions. The first result of the partnership between the two companies combines Huawei’s FusionServer series with SANsymphony. You can also add Huawei’s Oceanstor SSD storage and existing storage systems via iSCSI or Fibre Channel connectivity.

Nexenta

NexentaConnect is a suite that combines SDS with cloud and desktop features to provide features such as performance acceleration, automation and analytics. NexantaStor is the storage component and it delivers unified file and block storage services that run on commodity hardware. It is said to simplify storage management and to scale from tens of TBs to PBs.

Michael Letschin, Director of Product Management Solutions, Nexenta, also talked about added elements of the suite. NexentaEdge (beta), he said, is object, file and block storage for OpenStack and big data applications. It delivers Cinder Block and Swift/S3 object storage services, and it integrates through a Horizon management plug-in to streamline storage management and capacity planning. This element will add storage defined networking capabilities to the SDS side. Finally, NexentaFusion (beta) adds more analytics as well as orchestration software.

“This automates arrangement, coordination and management of complex compute systems, data stores and services without the need for administrators to pre-define the nature and placement of data,” said Letschin.

Scality

Scality’s RING product is said to be designed for petabyte-scale storage environments at enterprises, governments and service providers. Leo Leung, vice president of corporate marketing at Scality, reported that the company is seeing serious adoption from the media and entertainment industry as they look to tackle the massive on-demand wave for their customers.

The RING addresses the limits of scaling traditional storage systems to petabytes of capacity. Traditional storage falls down at that scale, said Leung, exposing performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies in data protection, becoming increasingly unreliable as the system grows.

“Scality RING scales to hundreds of petabytes and billions of files, while improving performance linearly and maintaining 100% uptime and data durability with an average of only 50% overhead,” he said. “For the first time, storage and data center customers have complete choice of hardware, today and tomorrow, with no penalties for mixing and matching hardware generations, form factors, and densities.”

Tintri

Tintri touts its application-aware storage as providing VM-level visibility, control, insight and agility. The company is all about storage virtualization technology that is said to learn and adapt to existing environments by seeing how applications behave at the virtualization layer.

This is built on its FlashFirst architecture that understands and integrates with VMs and virtual disks. Tintri VMstore then uses flash along with deduplication, compression and data placement automation.

Most recently, it released Tintri OS 3.2 to enable administrators to allocate exact maximum and minimum IOPS to individual VMs. VM-level QoS is paired with visualization of resource contention to view the immediate impact of throttle changes on VM-level latency. In addition, Tintri SyncVM allows users to move between snapshots of a VM without losing other snapshots or performance history. Finally, Tintri Global Center 2.0 makes it possible to manage 100,000 VMs from one interface.

Microsoft

A little known company from Redmond, WA, is also making a push for market share in SDS. Microsoft’s Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) is a clustering initiative that makes file shares continuously available for server application storage. It makes it possible to share the same folder from multiple nodes of one cluster and is built around the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.

Starwind

Starwind is another startup with a hypervisor-centric approach to SDS. The Starwind Virtual SAN provides a fault-tolerant storage pool that is said to be built for virtualization workloads from scratch. It mirrors inexpensive internal storage between hosts and eliminates any need for physical shared storage.

OpenStack

OpenStack certainly embraces SDS, but it goes beyond it into what it terms a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage and https://socaflow.com networking resources throughout a data center. Everything is managed through a dashboard that allows users to provision storage through a web interface.

Actifio

Actifio characterizes itself as the copy data virtualization company, but it very much operates in the SDS space. Actifio One is a cloud-based service built on its data virtualization technology to make applications easily available. It can run on various physical servers, as well as VMware, Windows, Hyper-v, Linux, https://Fsecan.ca/blog/Index.Php?entryid=305175 Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

There are more companies, of course, operating in this space. But those covered in this series provide a good place to start for anyone investigating software-defined storage.