After spending the last few weeks looking into which server to choose for virtualization, a natural next question is, "What should I use for storage?" I think that the answer to that question may be easier in some ways, but more complicated in other ways.

Mark Farley, on the InsideIT blog, highlighted a recent video by Darren Thomas, General Manager of Storage—aka Chief Storage Guy—here at Dell that focuses on how storage virtualization works well with server virtualization. Just as VMs are able to use live migration to move from one physical server to another, virtualized storage can move those same VMs from one storage array to another. The result is that you have a tremendous amount of flexibility and availability.

There are three major categories for storage: local, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel. There are lots of choices within these options, but I think that when deciding what to use to support your virtualization servers this one is the best for starting organization. If you are going to only have one virtualization server (or one per location) then local storage will work just great. If you already have an existing Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) and existing expertise to manage it, then Fibre may be the best solution for your virtualization server farm. Everybody else should probably take a really hard look at iSCSI.

Within the iSCSI category at Dell we have three areas to pick from: PowerVault MD3000i, Dell EqualLogic PS Series, and Dell | EMC AX and CX iSCSI arrays. I think that the decision here also breaks down very similar to how we arrived at the type of storage. For smaller deployments or those that do not need array level features like replication the PowerVault MD3000i (with an attractive entry-level price) is a good choice. For customers that already have some Dell|EMC fibre channel or iSCSI it might be a good idea to extend this environment with additional iSCSI for your virtualization needs. I think that the Dell|EqualLogic PS series is a strong contender for all other solutions.

Of course it’s really a bit more complicated than this, but this is the way that I frame up a conversation around storage for virtualization solutions.

Todd