VMware’s vSphere brings storage flexibility, greater speed to SaaS provider

When VMware launched its latest virtualization platform, vSphere, it introduced the phrase “cloud operating system� to the IT industry.

The terminology may seem like a marketing gimmick, but there are real-world benefits in the over-hauled virtualization software, as one early user of vSphere has found. Officials at TradeBeam, a software-as-a-service provider of supply-chain management services, say they have seen dramatically faster I/O throughput and been simplified the mapping of virtual machines to storage simply by upgrading from the previous VMware platform to vSphere. (See Network World's test of vSphere 4.0 here.)

With the prior version, VMware Infrastructure 3.5, it was easy to move virtual machines from one physical server to another, but difficult to move virtual machines from one storage box to another, says Nasser Mirzai, vice president of IT at TradeBeam in San Mateo, Calif.

VSphere automates that process, which comes in handy when a TradeBeam customer needs to move to a bigger storage system or is moved from a storage box built by one vendor to one built by another.

“I can keep virtual servers intact, and map them to another physical storage without bringing down the systems or rebuilding the environment,� Mirzai says. “We could have done that in the past [with version 3.5] but it wasn’t as easy.�

The key features are Storage vMotion, or live migration of virtual machine disk files across different storage arrays; and thin provisioning, which allows over-allocation of storage capacity.

At Tradebeam, new flexibility with storage also helps prevent wasted disk space, Mirzai says. In the past Mirzai might have set aside 200GB for a customer based upon potential needs, but if it turned out the customer only used 50GB then the rest would be wasted for months.

According to VMware, vSphere has doubled the processors available to VMs, more than doubled the network interface cards available to VMs, quadrupled memory, tripled network throughput, and doubled maximum I/O operations per second to more than 200,000.

TradeBeam began using beta versions of vSphere in November, and started to deploy the technology in production two months ago.

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