Maintain virtual logical unit number reliability and performance

Maintain virtual logical unit number reliability and performance

Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Writer
Thin provisioning is the process of storage oversubscription -- creating a LUN that's larger than the physical storage allocated to it -- and then adding more physical storage as the LUN fills. For example, thin provisioning can create a 1 TB LUN, but only assign 100 GB of physical space to start. As the initial 100 GB fills, you can add storage up to the total size of the provisioned LUN. This technology is very efficient and prevents considerable storage waste because an application "thinks" it has the fully-sized LUN but only receives the space that it actually uses.

Thin provisioning previously existed as its own form of virtualization, but it can prove problematic when used in a fully virtualized storage environment.

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

    When you register, my team of editors will also send you the latest expert resources covering all areas of server virtualization, such as platforms, architectures and strategies, server hardware, managing virtual environments, application issues and more.

    Cathleen A. Gagne, Senior Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchServerVirtualization.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchServerVirtualization.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

Introduction to Virtualization e-book
This article is excerpted from Chapter 5 of the Introduction to Virtualization e-book, which covers the basics of server virtualization technology. Learn about server consolidation, disaster recovery, high availability and more.

"Storage virtualization has not supported thin provisioning very well," said Ray Lucchesi, president and founder of Silverton Consulting Inc., an independent technology consulting firm headquartered in Broomfield, Colo. New virtualized blocks can be written anywhere in the storage environment, he said, and the work that's needed to copy or migrate data between LUNs may not even move data off a particular storage system.

"In a storage virtualization environment, that deletion [migration] requires a lot of understanding about what's on that physical volume at any instant in time," Lucchesi said.

Although you can use thin provisioning in a virtual setting, it's important to track and monitor storage use to prevent exhausting the LUN space.

Creating and managing a virtual LUN gives storage administrators a great deal of flexibility for moving them around. Storage virtualization doesn't hinder the ability to resize LUNs, but dynamic resizing often requires specialized or storage system-specific software tools.

Administrators must be concerned with overall reliability and vulnerabilities found in any virtual storage infrastructure's single point of failure. RAID technology and fast-disk rebuilds, for example, won't prevent an array from becoming inaccessible when a main board fails or an array is rebooted after a software/firmware upgrade. When that happens, all access is cut to any LUNs stored on the array.

Some high-availability storage may guard against trouble by implementing redundant storage arrays, though the added layer of protection may inflate costs and reduce application storage performance. Look for quality-of-service features that allow storage performance to be optimized for certain applications or data types.

This was first published in November 2009

Disclaimer: Our Tips Exchange is a forum for you to share technical advice and expertise with your peers and to learn from other enterprise IT professionals. TechTarget provides the infrastructure to facilitate this sharing of information. However, we cannot guarantee the accuracy or validity of the material submitted. You agree that your use of the Ask The Expert services and your reliance on any questions, answers, information or other materials received through this Web site is at your own risk.

Back to top