by Greg Roody
]We get asked how VMware environments can take advantage of Cloud Storage often enough that I thought I’d mention a few options here for use cases that make financial and operational sense.
Backup
I’ve covered using CloudArray with VDR here before, so I won’t dwell on this other than to mention that any backup application that makes use of the new vStorage API’s, performs deduplication and can write to disk is an excellent choice to reduce backup expenses as well as gain an offsite storage component with Cloud Storage.
Archival
Another interesting use case is archival of older VM’s, Templates, or infrequently used VM’s such as test environments. In these cases, you can use Storage vMotion to migrate the datastore for these VM’s from your primary SAN to Cloud Storage. They will still appear as though they are local to your ESX server, but the data will be kept resident in offsite Cloud Storage. If you need to use them at any time, they can either be used with their datastore on Cloud Storage or they could be migrated back for the time they are needed. You can also Clone VM’s, or Clone VM’s to a Template with the target being cloud storage volumes.
Migration/Replication
By now you are seeing that Cloud Storage can be an excellent way to store VM’s you don’t need immediate access to, either by using a backup product such as VDR or by simply archiving your VM’s. But there is another valuable use for Cloud Storage use as well; as a migration “swing” set. For example, if you have some VM’s that you want to transfer between datacenters, or even between ESX hosts, you can use Cloud Storage as a place to first write the VM files from one host or site, and then read them to another host or site.
Pay as you go, provision it yourself
Remember, Cloud Storage is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. If you need a few TB of storage to do a migration, you will only pay for the storage you actually use until you destroy it. Additionally, it is elastic and can be self provisioned. You don’t have to make a request to a Storage Administrator to provision and assign the storage resources. A VMware administrator could easily manage this themselves.
Is Cloud Storage ready for VMware? Absolutely, and so are you.
