What is thin provisioning, and is it good or bad for our virtualization plans?
becker 1 year ago
Should virtual servers over-provision storage, or is this a slippery slope to adding instabilities that could threaten our Hyper-V installation?
Topic: Virtualization
Answer this Question
Answers
1 total
Related Questions
2 years ago
Help?
1 year ago
In a recent interview with the former CTO of Citrix, it was reported that virtualization's greatest benefit is to provide better...
1 year ago
Are there any open-source virtualization tools for hosting virtual servers in the cloud? Do they compare to commercial programs or are...
1 year ago
Does it make sense to virtualize our servers if we only have one or two? There's a certain amount of cost and transition pain involved...
1 year ago
My buddy at work says that we can save time running backups of our VM's by just running snapshots. I say that's not exactly the case....
Ask a question
VMware has partnered with Verizon to offer dual persona smartphones for Verizon enterprise customers. It's currently available on two Android-based phones, but more Android devices and iOS support are expected soon.
The combination of highly virtualized environments inside enterprise networks, along with an explosion of mobile traffic, are exposing the limitations of existing networks, and driving the need for a new era of dynamic and scalable networks of the future, IDC researchers said in a panel discussion at Interop.
Software defined networking (SDN) is generating a lot of buzz these days, but the technology will ultimately make itself useful in the enterprise largely because it will save enterprises time in deploying new applications, predicted Martin Casado, chief architect of networking at VMware.
Companies are turning to fault tolerant servers as a way to improve uptime, but they may not be right for every enterprise.
Brocade this week extended its data center networking portfolio with hardware and software enhancements designed to better integrate and align physical and virtual resources.
One upside to virtualization is that it puts more applications on fewer servers. One downside is that the availability of those servers become of greater importance.
While some progress has been achieved in getting virtual machines to run across different types of hypervisors, more work is still needed to bring them to the level of portability that enterprises are seeking, according to a study released by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA).
About three years ago Embotics jumped into developing support in its private cloud management platform for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, hopeful that the VMware virtualization challenger would take off. When that takeoff initially stalled, Embotics curtailed its Hyper-V work to focus resources elsewhere.
The third annual Open Networking Summit, an SDN conference organized by the Open Networking Foundation, convened this week just after ONF members Cisco and IBM unveiled a separate effort to define an open source SDN framework. Unlike the user-driven ONF, OpenDaylight is a vendor-driven project to cultivate a system of SDN applications, but it also raised suspicion of the group's real intent: Is it designed to stall SDN's momentum and the threat, real or perceived, it could pose to incumbent hardware vendors? ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt discussed some of these topics with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy at the Santa Clara, Calif., conference.
If software-defined networking ultimately changes the landscape of networking, Intel could be one of the biggest beneficiaries -- and might be one of the reasons.
White Papers & Webcasts
White Paper
Controlling the Cost of File Transfers
White Paper
Secure Data Streaming with Attachmate FileXpress
See more White Papers | Webcasts
Thin-provisioning and over-subscription are related. Thin provisioning is a method for optimizing storage by not allocating physical storage to a virtual machine until it is requested, by virtualizing storage so that virtual machines save files to virtual drives. In this manner, you could tell a virtual machine that it has 500gb of available storage, but the server may only need 200gb today, so only 200gb is used. If that storage volume is hosted on a 2TB RAID, rather than assigning up 500gb up front, it still has 300gb of that available to use with other virtual machines that may request it. The process of having multiple virtual machines share this 2TB RAID is called over-subscription. While the cumulative amount of storage assigned to all the virtual servers may currently exceed the physical amount installed, they may very well only need a percentage of the actual total space.
What makes this dangerous is if you have an influx of new data (Christmas orders, or perhaps a database scripting bug) which would then cause your storage requirements to radically increase. As long as you're doing a good job of managing your storage use and planning for adding additional drives to the array (you're using an ISCSI SAN I hope), this should not be an issue.