Building Blocks of the Private Cloud is specially brought to you by SCS Enterprise Cloud Computing & Virtualisation SIG. Speaker Mr Daniel Mar, Principal Consultant with Infront Consulting Group, is an experienced consultant with over 12 years in the IT industry. He has been specialising in server virtualization for the past 7 years where he started by deploying technologies from VMware. He also picked up Citrix virtualisation solutions and now focuses on Microsoft Virtualisation and Systems Management. He has helped many companies move from a purely physical infrastructure to a highly available virtual infrastructure and also help them deploy private cloud infrastructures.

1. The Building Blocks of the
Private Cloud
Part 2 - Storage
Daniel Mar
daniel@infrontconsulting.com

2. Review Part 1 - Compute
• Private Cloud Hypervisors
– XenServer Scalability and Support
– Hyper-V Features and Capabilities
– vSphere Costs and Licenses
• Private Cloud Management
System Center Virtual Machine
Manager 2012
Uploaded to Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/DanielMar2/building-blocks-of-the-private-cloud-compute

3. The Private Cloud Defined
Pooled
Self Service Elastic Usage Based
Resources
Control Customizable
It’s cloud dedicated to you.

4. Private Cloud Storage End
to End
VM Storage
Virtual Host Storage
Storage Subsystem

5. Storage End to End for the
Private Cloud Example
C: drive [50GB], D: drive [200GB]
Machine
Virtual
Volume
VM
Logical Disk VHD format – Fixed/Dynamic
Hyper-V Host
C:Cluster StorageVolume1
Host
Virtual
Volume
Logical Disk .BIN
.VSV
.XML
.VHD
Cluster Shared Volume disks
LUNs mapped by FC or iSCSI
Storage
System
Logical Unit
NetApp FAS2020
Storage Pool Flex Volume supporting Dedup
Storage Array Aggregate – RAID6
Physical Disk SAS 15K 600GB Disk

6. Physical Disk Selection Physical Disk
IOPS – Input/Output Operations per sec – performance
Storage
System
measurement used to benchmark computer storage
• Disk Types and IOPS Performance
Type Drive type IOPS Interface
HDD 7.2K SATA ~75-100 SATA 3Gb/s
HDD 10K SATA ~125-150 SATA 3Gb/s Use
HDD 10K SAS ~140 SAS for
HDD 15K SAS ~175-210 SAS Prod
SSD Various ~60,000 SATA 6Gb/s
$$$
SSD Various ~250K – 1.2M FC

7. Redundant Array of Inexpensive
Disk (RAID) selection Storage Array
Storage
System
• Ensures data recovery in the event of a hard disk
failure
– RAID 0 (Striping)
– RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring)
– RAID 5 (Striping with distributed parity)
– RAID 6 (Striping with dual distributed parity)
– RAID 10 (Mirroring with Striping)
• Which one is best for Private Cloud Storage?
– RAID 10 gives the best performance
– RAID 5 or RAID 6 gives better cost vs available capacity

8. Storage Pool features Storage Pool
• Features you should expect from your SAN provider
Storage
System
Deduplication (single instance Thin Provisioning
storage)
Before After
• Other features – Fast Cloning, Snapshots, Replication
• Some providers offer features such as Network RAID
– Protects multiple volumes of data across a cluster of storage nodes,
eliminating any single point of failure in the SAN infrastructure.

9. Connecting LUNs to Hosts Logical Unit
• Multiple storage architectures are available
Storage
System
– Design a trade-off between performance, capacity,
cost, and manageability
– Stick with common industry standards and
implementations
iSCSI Considerations Fibre Channel Considerations
- 1GB or 10GB? - 2GB, 4GB, 8GB or 16GB?
- Single path, Teaming, MPIO - No of HBAs, Single/Dual
- Security, VLANs - MPIO, Zoning

10. Virtual Host storage
Virtual
Host
Volume
• Hypervisor considerations
– Local Disk - Use RAID 1 Logical Disk .BIN
.VSV
.XML
.VHD
– USB Flash Drive based
– Boot from SAN
• Data volumes storing VMs coming from a SAN
Storage Pools
– RAID 1 (single base host architecture with lower
performance needs)
– RAID 10 (all base host architectures with high
performance needs)
[Same actually applies to Direct Attached Disk]

11. Virtual Machine storage
Machine
Virtual
Volume
• Types of Virtual Hard Disks
Logical Disk
Thick Provisioned Thin Provisioned Parent-Child)
(Fixed) (Dynamic) (Differencing Disks)
Reserve all capacity when Capacity grows as disk Parent is read only
created space is consumed Child contains changes
Recommended for Useful for Test / Dev Recommended for LABs
Production environments environments and used for snapshots
Recommendation: Don’t combine Thin Provisioning from the VM layer with Thin
Provisioning from the Storage layer

12. Storage Management
System Center Virtual Machine
Manager 2012
Windows Server 2012 RC

13. Managing Storage
• System Center Virtual
Machine Manager 2012
– Manages Storage on SANs
using SMI-S Provider
• NetApp, EMC, HP Dell, IBM, HDS
,
– Create Storage Classifications
• Gold, Silver, Bronze, Green, etc
– Rapid provisioning a VM using
SAN array hardware copy
capabilities
– Storage End-to-End mapping

14. System Center Virtual
Machine Manager 2012
• Storage Management – Classifications and
Pools

15. Windows 2012 Storage
• Storage Spaces
– Putting drives into a virtual pool from which self-healing
virtual disks can be created
– Provide automated data protection and resiliency against
physical drive failures, and a storage volume that is
actually larger than individual physical drives.
– Types
• Basic
• Mirror
• Parity

16. Demo
Windows 2012 – Storage Spaces

17. Final Words
• The line between storage
Machine
Virtual
Volume
and virtualisation platform is
Logical Disk
being blurred.
• Selection of storage for your
Host
Virtual
Volume
Private Cloud
Logical Disk .BIN
.VSV
.XML
.VHD
– Cost vs Performance
– Resiliency vs Redundancy
Storage
System
• Storage Management and
Logical Unit
Storage Pool Tiering is important
• Take a look new storage
Storage Array
features in Windows 2012
Physical Disk Release Candidate

18. Links and upcoming events
• Email: daniel@infrontconsulting.com
• Useful Links
– Part 1 - Compute -
http://www.slideshare.net/DanielMar2/building-blocks-of-the-
private-cloud-compute
– Comparing 8GB FC vs 10GB iSCSI Analysis Report –
http://www.emulex.com/artifacts/e261005e-461e-42b1-ba7e-
0778297b2c34/​thirdIO.pdf
– Storage Management in Windows 2012 -
http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-
cloud/archive/2011/10/14/windows-server-8-standards-
based-storage-management.aspx
– http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/05/virtualizing-
storage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx
• Look out for final part on Building Blocks for the Private
Cloud Part 3 – Network