September 30, 2014 at 19:56HP Offers Free Virtual Storage Appliance Licenses
HP and Intel announced a partnership in the incentive program, under which HP grants 1 terabyte free storage licenses for the HP StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) to all customers of Intel Xeon E5 v3-based servers.
To popularize the software, HP plans to distribute terabyte licenses for capacities with a total capacity of more than 72 petabytes. This will enable users to evaluate this software, and, given the scale of the action, there is reason to believe that the storage was worked out conscientiously.
For those who have never encountered this system, we suggest watching a video about the deployment of the Virtual Storage Appliance.
Architecture
The bottom line is pretty simple. On each server in the cluster, the VSA virtual machine rises. It uses local disks of the server it is running on and mirrors these disks to other virtual machines in this cluster. Due to mirroring, we get fault tolerance - our data is not lost during the scheduled or unscheduled shutdown of one of the servers.
The configuration of this cluster on two and three ESXi servers is different. In the case of a two-node cluster, you will need to install the auxiliary service VSA cluster service on the vCenter server, which will act as an arbiter when processing disputes between two virtual machines.
When there are three of them, they figure it out on their own.
“The cost of shared storage is a common barrier when using server virtualization for small and medium-sized businesses,” said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager of storage at HP.
By offering licenses free of charge for server workloads, HP and Intel make software-defined storage more accessible to the world, giving users access to storage services that are independent of the hypervisor and hardware, thereby lowering costs.
According to HP, the StoreVirtual VSA software takes full advantage of the server to provide reliable storage on virtual machines running VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Linux Kernel Virtual Machine.
Using VSA you get the following features:
On its new Gen9 servers, HP has added one-click automatic deployment of VSA. One of the goals of the company is to provide the full functionality of the public storage. VSA can scale to dozens of nodes and 1.6 petabytes of capacity.
HP also offers a free demo of its StoreOnce VSA software for 10 TB of hardware-independent, deduplication-based backup software. More information can be found here .
To popularize the software, HP plans to distribute terabyte licenses for capacities with a total capacity of more than 72 petabytes. This will enable users to evaluate this software, and, given the scale of the action, there is reason to believe that the storage was worked out conscientiously.
For those who have never encountered this system, we suggest watching a video about the deployment of the Virtual Storage Appliance.
Architecture
The bottom line is pretty simple. On each server in the cluster, the VSA virtual machine rises. It uses local disks of the server it is running on and mirrors these disks to other virtual machines in this cluster. Due to mirroring, we get fault tolerance - our data is not lost during the scheduled or unscheduled shutdown of one of the servers.
The configuration of this cluster on two and three ESXi servers is different. In the case of a two-node cluster, you will need to install the auxiliary service VSA cluster service on the vCenter server, which will act as an arbiter when processing disputes between two virtual machines.
When there are three of them, they figure it out on their own.
“The cost of shared storage is a common barrier when using server virtualization for small and medium-sized businesses,” said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager of storage at HP.
By offering licenses free of charge for server workloads, HP and Intel make software-defined storage more accessible to the world, giving users access to storage services that are independent of the hypervisor and hardware, thereby lowering costs.
According to HP, the StoreVirtual VSA software takes full advantage of the server to provide reliable storage on virtual machines running VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Linux Kernel Virtual Machine.
Using VSA you get the following features:
- Shared storage for all hosts based on local server drives
- the ability to use the vMotion migration and High Availability fault tolerance features;
- full replication of storage due to cross-replication;
- fault tolerance at the server level and fault tolerance at the storage system level;
- easy return of the physical server after its accident back to the cluster structure.
On its new Gen9 servers, HP has added one-click automatic deployment of VSA. One of the goals of the company is to provide the full functionality of the public storage. VSA can scale to dozens of nodes and 1.6 petabytes of capacity.
HP also offers a free demo of its StoreOnce VSA software for 10 TB of hardware-independent, deduplication-based backup software. More information can be found here .