Multiple hypervisors? What about multiple SANs?

Some of the cool kids are talking about a multi-hypervisor strategy these days.  Mostly journalists and such who could never truly feel the pain of dealing with two vastly different virtualization management platforms.

As you may recall, Red Hat is attempting to bring their new RHEV product to market by playing the old “don’t get stuck with a single vendor” trick.  Red Hat’s CEO claims:

“…customers don’t want one platform. They want two.”

Let’s save the multi-hypervisor discussion for another day, but shift to the topic of storage diversity.

While there may be a few environments that can standardize on a single storage area network technology, it typically  makes sense to mix and match iSCSI, NFS, or Fibre Channel SANs to optimize for cost and performance.

During my recent foray into the chaotic world of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, I encountered an unbelievable storage limitation with their new KVM hypervisor.

“Virtualization diversity… when and where we say”

VMware vSphere customers are free to mix and match supported storage technologies within datacenters, clusters, and even hosts.

I would have thought that a company like Red Hat that is pushing heterogeneous solutions and multiple vendors might feel the same way when it comes to storage.  But that’s not quite how things go in the land of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

With RHEV, a “Data Center” is configured to use a single type of storage;  all clusters and hosts in that Data Center are restricted to that, so choose wisely:

Storage Freedom

VMware vSphere allows administrators to move virtual disks for running VMs from one array to another — even between different types of arrays — with zero downtime.  Storage vMotion is a very powerful feature and it is simply not available from Red Hat – only VMware.

The Best Choice: VMware vSphere

Virtual machines have differing storage requirements — certainly not a one-size-fits-all component of an efficient virtual infrastructure.  The best platform for building your own private cloud is also the one with the broadest support for today’s storage technologies:  VMware vSphere.

Oh, by the way, did you know that VMware is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s newly-released x86 Server Virtualization Magic Quadrant.  Take a look at the full article — I’ll give a free subscription to the VCritical RSS feed to the first 10 people that spot Red Hat’s position.

Related posts:

1. What is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization?
2. These are not the files you are looking for
3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not Enterprise Virtualization
4. RHEV Manager — It’s not just a clever name
5. Idle RHEV Hypervisors save power?