Maximizing VMware Cloud Foundation with Hitachi VSP Storage and vVols

By Dinesh Singh posted 06-02-2021 20:57

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Hitachi and VMware design partnership recently introduced the ability to leverage vVols as principal storage for VMware Cloud Foundation environments. The newly released solution enables a flexible hybrid cloud to improve performance, enhance simplicity, and reduce costs.

Hitachi’s SDDC hybrid cloud solution Unified Compute Platform RS powered by VMware Cloud Foundation is rapidly gaining adoption, especially in federal, healthcare, and financial services customers due to its advanced automation and extension into public clouds allowing seamless data mobility.

Better together – Integrated VCF and VSP

However, many UCP RS customers were interested in combining vVols storage policy-based management framework with VCF to further simplify management and increase efficiency.
You might recall that Hitachi Vantara was a key design partner to enable external storage on VCF 3.8 with VMFS datastores for customers who relied on the enterprise-grade resiliency and scale combined with 100% data availability delivered by Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform. Hitachi Vantara had further fine-tuned its VCF integration by leveraging UCP Advisor to manage all datastore and storage-related automation tasks in a UCP Rack Scale (UCP RS) configuration such as LUN provisioning, host mapping, and zoning management on Fibre Channel switches from Brocade on top of handling HCI-related lifecycle management tasks such as compute node EFI, BMC, and IO cards firmware upgrades on UCP HC, and managing TOR switches from Cisco and Arista.

This unique approach enabled customers to meet the performance, availability, and data-protection needs of most demanding business applications. UCP RS with VSP as a principal storage provider delivers near-zero RPO/RTO for tier-1 applications. The enterprise-grade storage system delivers consistent sub-millisecond latency for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads. The enterprise-grade snapshots are enabled for test/dev and DevSecOps environments.

Introducing vVols Management to VSP storage and VCF
Now, VCF 4.1 and later releases bring in support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols). It allows customers to deliver individual data services per VMDK for increased efficiency. Hitachi’s rich policy-based management (PBM) engine with vVols framework ensures automation of VM provisioning per individual storage service requirement and enables right-sized used of storage resources and meet SLA targets. Another requirement we have seen is to keep the lifecycle of storage resources separate from compute clusters (think software upgrade in stretched clusters) where we see the extension of VCF with vVols meeting that criteria quite nicely.

Policy-based management delivers a consistent experience with vVols and vSAN delivering simplicity, agility, granular object-level services, and just-in-time right-sized provisioning to meet a variety of SLAs and data services requirements including support tier-1 applications and enterprise-grade remote replication service.

Through the VMware APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA), Hitachi Storage (VASA) Provider for VMware vCenter, or Hitachi VASA Provider, enables software-defined storage integration into the VMware Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) framework. SDDC Manager now registers Hitachi VASA Provider and creates vVols data store as part of workload domain creation. Integration like this enables seamless vVols integration into VCF delivering a cohesive vSAN and vVols user experience.

Aligning VM’s needs with VSP’s capabilities via policies

vVols enables you to use all of your array’s capabilities such as array-based snapshots, cloning,
and replication. All managed via policies, on a single vVols datastore that may span one or more pools or indeed multiple storages with our advanced virtualization capabilities, with VMDK level granularity.

With its pre-validated building blocks of compute, storage, and networking, the UCP RS architecture with VCF, VSP storage, UCP HC nodes, and UCP Advisor delivers a VMware certified VCF Integrated system. This integrated system delivers an agile hybrid cloud environment with predictable, efficient, reliable, and scalable performance and operations. The path to enable a private cloud leverages UCP RS to transform a traditional datacenter into a modernized software-defined datacenter (SDDC) and onwards to a hybrid cloud architecture.

Please ask your questions in the comment section below or visit www.hitachivantara.com/cloudfoundation for more information.

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Tanmoy Panja

05-19-2022 13:58

Excellent !!

Chayan Sarkar

05-02-2022 05:28

Excellent

Dipta Kundu

04-27-2022 02:52

Nicely Written

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