Hyper-V enlightenment from a beer commercial?
Posted Thursday, June 09, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
Remember the old Miller Lite commercial from the 1980s that had two distinct sets of committed adherents? One set of guys earnestly opined that they preferred the beer because it had “great taste” (debatable at best if you’ve ever actually tasted it), while the other was just as passionate about the fact that it was “less filling” (probably true). The ladies even got into the mix on this one. I can just imagine Hyper-V systems administrators, just as emotionally charged, having heated debates about which is better when it comes to virtual hard drives (VHDs) – high performance or thin provisioned.
Now this argument would be applicable if you’re just looking at the native Hyper-V VHD options. Of course, there’s another option. Instead of drinking a lite beer at around 60 cents a can, you could choose a bottle of 1994 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon at $2,000 a bottle. They’re both designed to address the same problem – thirst – but they each get there a little differently. In storage terms, this is the difference between the cost of using a native Hyper-V VHD option or buying a high end enterprise class array where your “by-the-drink” price (i.e. $/GB) is going to be a lot higher. Sure, if I buy a high end NetApp or EMC array, I’ll get both high performance and thin provisioning, but isn’t there another way to do the same thing that is a little more affordable?
Actually, there is, and that’s where Virsto comes in. Install our software in the parent partition of a Hyper-V node, and you’ll get VHDs that are both high performance and thin provisioned at the same time. But it doesn’t stop there. When you use a Virsto VHD (which our marketing guy cleverly calls a vDisk), you also get very scalable, high performance snapshot/clone technology and cluster-awareness for full support of Hyper-V Live Migration that you can use with any block-based storage. This is like getting a full layout of prime rib, cooked rare, with a baked potato and fresh seasonal vegetables, to go with that bottle of cabernet.
Oh, and did I mention that your cluster-aware vDisks, which are managed exactly like native Hyper-V VHDs, will support very high performance snapshot backups using Windows VSS and Microsoft DPM? Add a Caesar salad and white glove table service to that bottle of cab.
So if you’ve been agonizing over which group you’re in (great taste/high performance or less filling/thin provisioned) when it comes to choosing storage options for your Hyper-V environment, you now know how to get both without breaking the bank. If you'd like Screaming Eagle cab "taste" at lite beer prices, you might want to check us out. But while our customers are passionate about what we provide for them, I don’t expect to see mud wrestling youtube videos as sys admins hash out their Hyper-V storage preferences anytime soon!
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