Using EqualLogic ASM/ME “inside” Virtual Servers
January 20th, 2010With your purchase of an EqualLogic Array, you now have a wealth of advanced integration and functionality at no additional charge or licensing with Microsoft’s Exchange Server, SQL Server and File Shares. The power of this advanced integration will allow you to backup and restore data every 5 minutes if you would like with no interruption to your applications or users accessing those applications.
Now that you are moving into Server Virtualization and virtualizing these applications, there is additional planning and architecture required to continue to leverage Auto-Snapshot Manager/Microsoft Edition inside your Virtual Servers.
The following planning remains the same whether you are moving to Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere.
The key is to create additional Volumes on your EqualLogic Array and map/log on to these Volumes through the iSCSI Initiator inside of your Virtual Sever.
Here is an oversimplified example with VMware vSphere:
- Create a Volume named Vol1 on the EqualLogic Array and map as a Datastore
- Virtual Server running Windows Server 2008 is created in Vol1 DataStore
- Inside this Virtual Server you create a Folder, C:\Shares
- This C:\Shares will not be able to use or leverage ASM/ME for snapshots, clones, etc
- Basically any volumes that you create inside of this Virtual Server using the Datastore will not be able to leverage ASM/ME
Here is the next step that will allow you to leverage ASM/ME inside of your Virtual Server
- Create a Volume named Vol2 on the EqualLogic Array
- Inside of the Virtual Server, first make sure you install the HIT
- Next open the iSCSI Initiator and map/log on to Vol2
- In Disk Management, format Vol2 and assign a Drive Letter
- Now create Folders and Shares in this new volume
- Now you can open and use ASM/ME
- For Exchange you could create (2) Volumes on the EqualLogic Array called ExchDB and EXCHLogs and map those accordingly through the iSCSI Initiator as Drive E: and Drive F: (click below)
