Virsto and Hyper-V: A Compelling Alternative in the Data Center
Posted Friday, February 25, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
It was clear when Hyper-V R2 first shipped in 2009, that Microsoft was directly coming after VMware. Since then, Hyper-V R2 has evolved at a rapid rate with major new feature additions, the latest key one being the release of dynamic memory in Hyper-V R2 SP1. There are still some challenges when deploying Hyper-V in the type of complex environments required in larger production environments though. If you’re looking to enhance your experience with storage performance, storage capacity consumption, provisioning times, snapshot backups with Windows Volume Shadowcopy Services (VSS) and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) or cluster shared volumes (CSVs), then you will be interested to know more about Virsto.
Virsto provides a software plug in to Hyper-V R2 that integrates seamlessly with System Center management tools through an MMC snap-in and puts Hyper-V into “hyper drive” in 4 areas:
- Achieve dramatic performance gains: Virsto increases the number of IOPS you can push through your existing disk spindles by as much as 3x – 4x.
- Make storage capacity consumption much more efficient: Virsto decreases storage by using thin provisioned disks.
- Accelerate VM provisioning: Virsto delivers provisioning via snapshot/clone technology that works with heterogeneous storage, supports an unlimited number of snapshots without consuming any additional storage capacity and introduces no performance degradation.
- Enable high Performance HA: Virsto enables most of the “HA” functionality of CSVs to allow shared access at the volume level without any performance, snapshot backup, or management limitations.
Virsto achieves these benefits by implementing an innovative virtual storage layer that runs on any heterogeneous, block-based storage and is completely transparent to administrators and applications after initial installation. What these features provide in terms of bottom line benefits to our customers running in production today include:
- Improve the ROI of virtualization projects. Lowering the overall cost/virtual server by significantly increasing the VM density they can support with their existing storage infrastructure.
- Jumpstart stalled VDI projects. Enabling VDI deployments where, prior to using Virsto, high storage costs had made the cost/desktop prohibitive and effectively cancelled the project.
- Defer incremental storage purchases. Delaying the need to purchase additional storage hardware (in cases where these customers already owned the storage) by making much more efficient use of existing storage resources.
- Reduce administrative overhead. Saving hours and in some cases days in provisioning times by enabling instant snapshotting that consumes no additional storage capacity.
- Enable flexibility with lower cost storage. Allowing customers to build highly available virtual environments that would otherwise have had to leverage CSVs without requiring the purchase of enterprise-class storage to address performance and snapshot backup limitations.
Analysts are starting to comment on our technology as well. Storage Switzerland took a look at our technology recently and their takeaway was clear: “Virsto also makes Hyper-V more relevant and capable. They may by themselves cause a data center to more strongly consider Hyper-V than they did in the past.” You can check out the rest of the blog here. You can also see what some of our production customers are saying in case studies on our website (hosting provider SSI, etc.).
If you want a data center-ready server virtualization alternative to vSphere based on Hyper-V R2, you might want to look into Virsto. Feel free to try Virsto out by downloading an eval here.
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