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Storage is typically the most important element of any virtual data center. It is the key component in system performance, availability, scalability, and manageability. It has also traditionally been the most expensive component from a capital and operational cost perspective.

The storage infrastructure must meet not only today's requirements, but also the business needs for years to come, because of the capital expenditure costs historically associated with the hardware. Storage and vSphere architects must therefore make the most informed choices possible, designing solutions that take into account multiple complex and contradictory business requirements, technical goals, forecasted data growth, constraints, and of course, budget.

In order for you to be confident about undertaking a vSphere storage design that can meet the needs of a whole range of business and organization types, you must understand the capabilities of the platform. Designing a solution that can meet the requirements and constraints set out by the customer requires calling on your experience and knowledge, as well as keeping up with advances in the IT industry. A successful design entails collecting information, correlating it into a solid design approach, and understanding the design trade-offs and design decisions.

The primary content of this book addresses various aspects of the VMware vSphere software-defined storage model, which includes separate components. Before you continue reading, you should ensure that you are already well acquainted with the core vSphere products, such as VMware vCenter Server and ESXi, the type 1 hypervisor on which the infrastructure's virtual machines and guest operating systems reside.

It is also assumed that you have a good understanding of shared storage technologies and networking, along with the wider infrastructure required to support the virtual environment, such as physical switches, firewalls, server hardware, array hardware, and the protocols associated with this type of equipment, which include, but are not limited to, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, Ethernet, and FCoE.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book will be most useful to infrastructure architects and consultants involved in designing new vSphere environments, and administrators charged with maintaining existing vSphere deployments who want to further optimize their infrastructure or gain additional knowledge about storage design. In addition, this book will be helpful for anyone with a VCA, VCP, or a good foundational knowledge who wants an in-depth understanding of the design process for new vSphere storage architectures. Prospective VCAP, VCIX, or VCDX candidates who already have a range of vSphere expertise but are searching for that extra bit of detailed knowledge will also benefit.

What Is Covered in This Book?

VMware-based storage infrastructure has changed a lot in recent years, with new technologies and new storage vendors stepping all over the established industry giants, such as EMC, IBM, and NetApp. However, life-cycle management of the storage platform remains an ongoing challenge for enterprise IT organizations and service providers, with hardware renewals occurring on an ongoing basis for many of VMware's global customer base.

This book aims to help vSphere architects, storage architects, and administrators alike understand and design for this new generation of VMware-focused software-defined storage, and to drive efficiency through simple, less complex technologies that do not require large numbers of highly trained storage administrators to maintain.

In addition, this book aims to help you understand the design factors associated with these new vSphere storage options. You will see how VMware is addressing these data-center challenges through its software-defined storage offerings, Virtual SAN and Virtual Volumes, as well as developing cloud automation approaches to these next-generation storage solutions to further simplify operations.

This book offers you deep knowledge and understanding of these new storage solutions by

• Providing unique insight into Virtual SAN and Virtual Volumes storage technologies and design

• Providing a detailed knowledge transfer of these technologies and an understanding of the design factors associated with the architecture of this next generation of VMware-based storage platform

• Providing guidance over delivering storage as a service (STaaS) and enabling enterprise IT organizations and service providers to deploy and maintain storage resources via a fully automated cloud platform

• Providing detailed and unique guidance in the design and implementation of a stretched Virtual SAN architecture, including an example solution

• Providing a detailed knowledge transfer of legacy storage and protocol concepts, in order to help provide context to the VMware software-defined storage model

Finally, in writing this book, I hope to help you understand all of the design factors associated with these new vSphere storage options, and to provide a complete guide for solution architects and operational teams to maximize quality storage design for this new generation of technologies.

The following provides a brief summary of the content in each of the 10 chapters:

Chapter 1 : Software-Defined Storage Design This chapter provides an overview of where vSphere storage technology is today, and how we've reached this point. This chapter also introduces software-defined storage, the economics of storage resources, and enabling storage as a service.

Chapter 2 : Classic Storage Models and Constructs This chapter covers the legacy and classic storage technologies that have been used in the VMware infrastructure for the last decade. This chapter provides the background required for you to understand the focus of this book, VMware vSphere's next-generation storage technology design.

Chapter 3 : Fabric Connectivity and Storage I/O Architecture This chapter presents storage connectivity and fabric architecture, which is relevant for legacy storage technologies as well as next-generation solutions including Virtual Volumes.

Chapter 4 : Policy-Driven Storage Design with Virtual SAN This chapter addresses all of the design considerations associated with VMware's Virtual SAN storage technology. The chapter provides detailed coverage of Virtual SAN functionality, design factors, and architectural considerations.

Chapter 5 : Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster Design This chapter focuses on one type of Virtual SAN solution, stretched cluster design. This type of solution has specific design and implementation considerations that are addressed in depth. This chapter also provides an example Virtual SAN stretched architecture design as a reference.

Chapter 6 : Designing for Web-Scale Virtual SAN Platforms This chapter addresses specific considerations associated with large-scale deployments of Virtual SAN hyper-converged infrastructure, commonly referred to as web-scale.

Chapter 7 Virtual SAN Use Case Library This chapter provides an overview of Virtual SAN use cases. It also provides a detailed solution architecture for a cloud management platform that you can use as a reference.

Chapter 8 : Policy-Driven Storage Design with Virtual Volumes This chapter provides detailed coverage of VMware's Virtual Volumes technology and its associated policydriven storage concepts This chapter also provides a lowlevel knowledge transfer as well as addressing in detail the design factors and architectural concepts associated with implementing Virtual Volumes

Chapter 9 : Delivering a Storage-as-a-Service Design This chapter explains how IT organizations and service providers can design and deliver storage as a service in a cloud-enabled data center by using VMware's cloud management platform technologies.

Chapter 10 : Monitoring and Storage Operations Design To ensure that a storage design can deliver an operationally efficient storage platform end to end, this final chapter covers storage monitoring and alerting design in the software-defined storage data center.