VMware or Microsoft? Dynamic Storage Management in Private Clouds

In our ongoing blog series – VMware or Microsoft – my co-worker, Keith Mayer delivers today’s post on Dynamic Storage Management in Private Clouds. Below is an excerpt…

No matter which virtualization platform you may be using today to power your Private Cloud , storage is probably one of your biggest costs, and perhaps one of your biggest pain points, too. Virtualized environments are, by their very nature, dynamic environments where storage requirements from one VM to the next can grow and evolve over time. Traditional enterprise storage infrastructures, while offering flexibility when initially provisioning storage, are often built from a more static “set-it-and-forget-it” standpoint – provision your storage pools, LUNs, storage processors and SAN connectivity upfront with the expectation that storage needs on a workload-by-workload basis will not vary greatly over time.

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When supporting Private Clouds, many administrators require ongoing dynamic control and automation for the storage platforms in use within an enterprise. In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the dynamic storage capabilities that I regularly use in the latest versions of two common enterprise virtualization platforms: VMware vSphere 5.5 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.

Specifically, we’ll be reviewing the following dynamic storage capabilities for VMs in this article:

  • Hot-adding VM Storage
  • Live Expand and Compact of VM Storage
  • Live Storage Migration
  • Automatically Move VM Storage across Storage Classes

Along the way, we’ll find that Microsoft virtualization solutions can provide substantial cost advantages in this area, as well as provide better storage support for heterogeneous virtualization environments with more than one hypervisor platform …

To read the rest of the article, click here -

VMware or Microsoft? Dynamic Storage Management in Private Clouds

-Cheers!