Autonomic Groups Feature Strikes a Blow to Server Virtualization Complexity

High-profile case studies about companies such as Google and Amazon document how they are leveraging the cost reductions that clustered virtualized servers make possible to improve reliability, scalability, performance and capacity. But as the clustering of virtualized servers becomes more prevalent for these reasons, the overhead associated with storage administration in these environments only increases. Provisioning storage volumes to clustered virtualized servers calls for more upfront planning; it takes longer due to the complexity involved; and, the probability of human error becomes difficult to avoid.

Clustering virtualized servers for live migration, availability, failover, disaster recovery and the other reasons mentioned is becoming almost a must-have due to the number of virtual machines (VMs) that individual physical servers host. Yet what companies can fail to account for as they cluster these virtualized servers is the complexity that sharing networked storage volumes among these virtualized servers can create.

For example, suppose you have five (5) clustered virtualized servers that each need shared access to ten (10) storage volumes on a networked storage system. To share these 10 storage volumes among these 5 virtualized servers, you will need to issue commands granting each virtualized server the permission to access each of these storage volumes. In short, up to 50 provisioning actions requiring hundreds and hundreds of commands may need to be issued and done correctly for this configuration to work.

Further, having personally done tasks like this in the past, I am describing a best case scenario where everything goes well. In a worst case scenario where the wrong commands are issued, I have seen it take weeks or even months to complete.

This problematic nature of correctly assigning these different storage volumes to all of these clustered virtualization servers suggests that companies identify and implement more simplified mechanism for storage provisioning and ongoing management in these environments.

This simplification is what today's Autonomic Groups feature announcement from 3PAR provides by removing much of the complexity that is commonly associated with storage provisioning in virtual environments (e.g. VMware) and database environments (e.g. Oracle RAC).

Perhaps the largest benefit it provides is that it reduces the complexity associated with storage provisioning in clustered virtualized server environments down to three "clicks".

Here is what changes from before. Rather than trying to grant each virtualized server access to each storage volume, 3PAR users can in one click put all virtualized servers into a single Host group. Similarly, all of the individual storage volumes can now be created and put into a single Storage Volume group in another click.  

Now when storage is assigned to these virtualized servers, rather than trying to do one-to-one mappings between each virtualized server host and individual storage volume, a single, final click in the GUI is all that needs to be issued to map the Host group to the Storage Volume group. Automation within 3PAR's operating system then presents this Storage Volume group to the Host group which preserves and presents the same LUN ID for this Storage Volume group to all of the servers in the Host group.

Autonomic Groups provide three other distinct benefits going forward as well:

1. When a new virtualized server host needs access to the Storage Volume group, administrators only need to add this new server to the Host group by issuing a single command. All of the storage volumes in the Storage Volume group get exported to the new server automatically.
2. Conversely, new storage volumes can be easily exported to all servers in the Host group by simply adding the new storage volume to the Storage Volume group. Again, this can be done with a single command and is automated, so no additional work is required on the part of the administrator.
3. Snapshots for data protection can be taken of the entire Storage Volume group in a single click with complete consistency across the group.  3PAR also announced Scheduler that automates the creation and deletion of Virtual Copy snapshots and can be used in conjunction with Autonomic Groups.

The Autonomic Groups feature still requires administrators to put specific hosts or storage volumes in their respective Host and Storage Volume groups during setup. However the time that this takes is literally seconds which is a fraction of what is normally required to assign one virtualized server its individual storage volumes under the old model.

The amount of risk that the Autonomic Groups feature removes coupled with the improvements in administrative efficiency that is adds should not be understated or ignored. As the number of virtualized servers and the mappings to their networked storage volumes grow, successfully mapping these storage volumes to each individual server manually can become both tedious and extremely difficult to complete successfully.

This also simplifies the occasional situations where virtualized servers are removed from the environment or replaced. Normally these tasks add entirely heightened levels of complexity to storage management but which this Autonomic Groups feature handles like any of the other tasks and accomplishes with the issuance of a single command.

Server virtualization is creating highly dynamic environments that can also become equally complex if organizations do not make tactical moves to mitigate this growing complexity. Today's release of the Autonomic Groups feature for 3PAR InServ Storage Servers strikes a blow to server virtualization complexity. It makes the initial and ongoing managing and provisioning of storage in virtualized environments easier and faster to accomplish while at the same time removing the risk and complexity that can quickly become pervasive in these environments.