The Virtual Machine Aware SAN
Despite the efficiency improvements virtualization brings to the data center, the proliferation of virtual machines also introduces new challenges for the SAN, including problems related to loss of visibility, security, traffic isolation for applications, quality of service (QoS), performance monitoring, and management complexity.This white paper reviews these setbacks and explores an approach that enables the SAN to support the virtualized data center by providing the following capabilities:
- Virtual SAN infrastructure to simplify cluster deployments
- Extension of virtual infrastructure management to SANs
- Security in a consolidated environment
- Use of NPIV to provide virtual machine identity in the SAN
- Troubleshooting and performance monitoring tools for each virtual machine