Veritas InfoScale™ 7.4.1 Virtualization Guide - Linux on ESXi
- Section I. Overview
- About Veritas InfoScale solutions in a VMware environment
- Section II. Deploying Veritas InfoScale products in a VMware environment
- Getting started
- Understanding Storage Configuration
- Section III. Use cases for Veritas InfoScale product components in a VMware environment
- Application availability using Cluster Server
- Multi-tier business service support
- Improving storage visibility, availability, and I/O performance using Dynamic Multi-Pathing
- How DMP works
- Improving data protection, storage optimization, data migration, and database performance
- Protecting data with InfoScale product components in the VMware guest
- Optimizing storage with InfoScale product components in the VMware guest
- Migrating data with InfoScale product components in the VMware guest
- Improving database performance with InfoScale product components in the VMware guest
- Setting up virtual machines for fast failover using Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability on VMware disks
- About setting up Storage Foundation Cluster File High System High Availability on VMware ESXi
- Configuring coordination point (CP) servers
- Section IV. Reference
How InfoScale solutions work in a VMware environment
Using InfoScale solutions in a VMware environment means that the InfoScale product runs in the operating system, inside the Virtual Machine (VM).
The InfoScalecomponent, such as Storage Foundation, does not run inside the VMware ESXi kernel or in the Hypervisor.
Figure: Architecture overview shows an example of the high-level architecture diagram with Storage Foundation running in the VM.
Figure: I/O path from Virtual Machine to storage shows the I/O path from the Virtual Machine to the storage.
VMware has several different methods to allocate block storage to a virtual machine:
File-based virtual disks created in VMFS or from NFS - Virtual Disk
Block storage mapped from local disk, Fibre Channel LUNs or iSCSI - Raw Device Mapping
VMware must be configured to use Raw Device Mapping for certain features of Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) to operate as they do in a physical server environment.
See When to use Raw Device Mapping and Storage Foundation.
Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) can be used in a Virtual Machine, either as a stand-alone product or as a component of another InfoScale product. In either case, DMP does not perform multi-pathing in the VM. The VMware architecture presents the Virtual Machine as a single data path and the Hypervisor layer takes care of the multi-pathing. Technically, you could possibly configure the same disk, with raw device mapping, over two different host bus adapters to a virtual machine. The resulting configuration is not supported because it would run two multi-pathing solutions on top of each other.
Although DMP does not perform multi-pathing in the VM, DMP is an integral part of the data path of InfoScale products and cannot be disabled. DMP performs device management tasks such as device discovery and thin reclamation.