While there are many new changes in VMWare ESXi 5.0, like Image Builder, Auto Deploy/Central Management, Firewall Changes, USB 3 Support and hardware upgrades, Today I’m going to highlight Storage DRS and Profile Driven Storage.
With vCenter 5.0 comes the introduction of Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) and Profile Driven Storage. It is common practice to implement standard VMware DRS inside your VMware cluster one would load balance your VMs (virtual machines) based upon CPU and Memory usage. The new feature within vCenter 5.0, SDRS, uses the same ideology but at the vSphere storage level.
SDRS monitors datastore capacity and disk latency metrics and will Storage vMotion VMs to a better suited storage (datastore’s). This reduces administrative overhead for the VMware admin. It will help mitigate situations where VMs run out of space and get paused or are running poorly due to insanely high disk latency on the disk subsystem.
Profile Driven Storage is another slick new feature that allows you to specify Storage SLAs on a VM level to ensure that performance is never impacted. vSphere APIs for Array Awareness (VASA) integrates with the underlying disk array and allows vCenter to understand the type of disk groups and disk tiers that are available to the host. vCenter will work with the array on moving the VM to the appropriate physical spindles or SSDs using SvMotion after it has been configured in the Storage Profile. If VASA is not available for your array you can manually configure your tiered storage by using different datastores for different tiers (e.g. EMC01-SSDs-DG#12).
SDRS and Profile Driven Storage combined with VASA will help in ensuring constant storage performance for mission critical VMs. Stayed tuned to www.blog.inetu.net for the next highlighted feature of vCenter/ESXi 5.0.
