One of the core components of a virtualized infrastructure is a new perspective on storage. A SAN or Storage Area Network is the most common and most flexible way to provide disk space to your virtual infrastructure. There are plenty of vendors out there
doing SANs from the biggies like HP, EMC, Hitachi, but for the SMB there are even better smaller scale more affordably options like Dell, Equallogic, Promise, and DataCore, Compellent. DataCore is a software only solution that can take any storage that a Windows OS can see and turn it into virtualized storage for any of your virtual machines. The SAN software solutions have the ability to aggregate disparate storage devices and make them presentable to the virtual machines, which is very handy for small shops that are growing organically.
The key factors in selecting storage for your virtual infrastructure are:
- Total Amount of storage needed. (keep in mind you can over subscribe your vm's and add disks to the SAN later)
- Redundancy (if all the servers are running off the SAN, you sure don't want the hardware to have a single point of failure)
- Feature Set (surprisingly there are some significant differences including replication ability, snapshotting, scalability)
- Scalability (keep in mind that storage is a core component of your virtual infrastructure so being able to scale it up easily should be a key factor in your choice.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Hypervisor selection





