Hifn, who describes itself as a catalyst behind storage
and networking innovation, has announced the first customer
installation of a new performance-optimised configuration of its
Swarm iSCSI storage appliance with VMware ESX Server.
The combined package is designed to offer
the benefits of a virtualised IT infrastructure with the cost
advantages of iSCSI storage networking.
The Hifn-QLogic VMware solution allowed five physical blade
servers, each running multiple virtual machines in an ESX clustered
configuration, to share the
virtualised storage of a single Swarm appliance. The addition
of the QLogic iSCSI HBA was said to allow for more virtual machines
to be added to the cluster with nominal performance
degradation.
The customer installation also included VMware’s Vmotion to provide
the live migration of running a virtual machine from one physical
server to another. The stated results were zero downtime,
continuous server availability and complete transaction
integrity.
The Swarm appliance enables the storage and sharing of VMware files
that encapsulate the entire state of the migrated virtual machine.
VMware’s clustered Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) allows
multiple installations of ESX Server to access the same virtual
machine files concurrently on the shared Swarm storage pool, thus
boosting IT
efficiency.
Live virtual machine migration gives customers the freedom to
perform hardware maintenance without scheduled downtime and
proactively migrate virtual machines away from failing or
under-performing servers, as well as performing load balancing
across all available ESX virtual machines.