Enhancing Storage Management and Availability in a Hyper-V Environment

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Introduction
With the move to virtual server environments accelerating, businesses are faced with several new challenges. More of a communal society, server virtualization takes advantage of sharing of common resources among many different operating systems. While providing benefits such as hardware and space consolidation, and increased utilization, it also poses new challenges in the datacenter, such as all eggs in one basket and how best to protect that basket, keeping it highly available and providing efficient means to recover from the inevitable disaster.

There are several platforms for virtualization available today, the most widely known being VMWare’s ESX, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. While VMware may be ahead in points in this ball game, it’s still yet early and opportunity abounds for the other players.

With Hyper-V, Microsoft has made a large wager in the virtualization space, proffering a platform that, both directly and indirectly target the leader, Third party vendors have to, at a minimum, consider it a potentially viable server virtualization platform and, if they want to remain competitive, develop their solutions to at least work with Hyper-V and, depending on the vendor, think of how they can provide solutions to some of the challenges that moving to a virtual server environment might pose and solutions that answer the question “why should I deploy Hyper-V in my datacenter?” so that they’re not only meeting those challenges, but also acting as enablers for Hyper-V and Microsoft.

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Written by: Jeffrey Armorer, Technical Product Manager, Storage and Availability Management Group