Fibre Channel SAN
Storage Area Networks (SANs) provide powerful features for a Virtual Infrastructure 3 environment, including VMware VMotion and VMware DRS. Storage consolidation within a SAN allows for the consistent application of data protection and disaster recovery. Fibre Channel SAN is the most common infrastructure for many organizations.
Fibre Channel SANs can be expensive to produce and deploy, especially in larger environments with multiple servers, switches and arrays. However, the combination of Fibre Channel SANs and VMware technology makes it possible to consolidate many virtual machines on a single shared storage resource in the SAN, simplifying management while improving scalability, reliability and performance.
iSCSI SAN
iSCSI is a key technology that delivers scalable, cost-effective, high-performance virtualized SAN environments. In a Fibre Channel SAN, changes with the infrastructure are time-consuming and error-prone, because the devices are attached to the network via a physical port address, specifically assigned and encoded within the device’s hardware. iSCSI support broadens the potential for full VMware deployments in both small and medium businesses by eliminating the cost and complexity of Fibre Channel SANs.
With VMware technology, iSCSI initiators are integrated into the VMware ESX kernel, allowing native access to iSCSI storage directly from the VMware ESX server hosts. Both hardware and software initiators are available. NIC teaming is supported with software initiators. The hardware initiator includes support for multi-pathing and for booting from SAN.
NAS
Network attached storage (NAS) devices offer all Virtualization Infrastructure 3 capabilities. Network Attached Storage provides file level access to storage over a standard LAN or WAN network. Typically NAS units are customized to just data storage, data access and storage and access management. NAS systems usually contain one to many hard disks and offer some level of redundancy (RAID). Often, NAS systems are referred as file servers since NAS is based on file-level access.
Take the Next Step
Discover how to enable live migration of storage arrays with VMware Storage VMotion or find resources and best practices for deploying shared storage for virtual machines.
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