Partners

Sanbolic, Inc

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Sanbolic, Inc. is a leading developer of software to simplify and share SAN storage. Sanbolic's products are designed to support Microsoft Windows applications that benefit from central administration of a large virtual storage pool on SAN storage accessed by multiple physical or virtual servers, and provide concurrent shared read and write access to a shared file system from multiple servers. Sanbolic's software is designed to be easy to install and intuitive to use by customers familiar with Windows.

Sanbolic, Inc. and Microsoft Virtualization

Sanbolic has worked closely with Microsoft to develop an enterprise clustered file system for physical and virtual Windows servers. This gives Hyper-V virtualization solutions the highest performance and most fully featured shared storage solution of any virtualization product.

Dynamic data center deployments depend on shared storage, and Sanbolic’s clustered file system provides performance, scalability, and management features unmatched in competing virtualization products. Sanbolic has designed its products to be easy to use and intuitive for Windows administrators, and can be deployed with any SAN storage hardware. Microsoft products recognize the active-active storage resource that Sanbolic’s products provide, and configures storage resources appropriately when deploying Hyper-V clusters. Sanbolic’s products can also be used with Windows applications running on virtual servers to provide high availability, scalability, and improved performance.

  • Sanbolic provides a high performance shared LUN solution for Hyper-V and Hyper-V R2 and is fully compatible with System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2. It can be used to enable zero downtime Live Migration even for virtual machines requiring high I/O performance

  • Sanbolic provides a dynamically assignable shared data LUN for Windows virtual machines, enabling improved availability, scale out of applications across multiple virtual servers access a single copy of application data, and improved performance for multi-tier or clustered processing applications

  • Sanbolic provides management tools for central configuration and assignment of storage resources, distributed snapshots for data availability, and active-active application clustering tools for SQL databases and other resources

Customer Scenario

Hyper-V and Sanbolic’s clustered file system and volume manager create a shared resource pool at both the server and storage layer, enabling a truly dynamic data center. All virtual machine images (.VHDs) can be stored on a single LUN available to all host machines, enabling quick or live migration to be used to move virtual machines between hosts. Sanbolic’s fully featured cluster file system enables ease of deployment, high performance, advanced data protection, and support for very large host clusters.

Sanbolic can also provide a shared data LUN that is dynamically assignable to Windows virtual servers. Application servers can share access to a SAN volume for high availability, application scale out and improved performance of multi-tier applications.

Sanbolic + Microsoft Solutions

Shared LUN solution for Hyper-V 2008 and Hyper-V 2008 R2

Melio FS and LaScala Volume Manager enables a shared LUN storage solution for Hyper-V that allows all virtual machines images (VHDs) to be stored on a shared storage LUN while providing ease of use, high performance, and advanced enterprise management features. Melio can be used to provide zero downtime Live Migrations of Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtual machines, even when they require high I/O performance. Melio provides essentially unlimited volume sizes, storage I/O reporting and per-VM quality of service management, and can support up to several hundred nodes in a storage cluster. Melio can be used with any SAN storage and is easily installed and configured.

When configuring Hyper-V migration clusters, Sanbolic’s products are recognized and active-active storage resources are configured appropriately.

Melio FS and LaScala are fully compatible with SCVMM 2008 R2.

Centrally managed shared SAN Application Data for Hyper-V virtual machines

Virtual machines running on Hyper-V can use local storage that is contained within the .VHD file. The virtual machines can also directly mount an iSCSI volume, or utilize an iSCSI or Fibre Channel LUN passed through from the host server as a block device. Utilizing a separate SAN storage volume for application data provides better scalability and flexibility of data management across physical and virtual servers in the data center. When an application data volume is formatted with NTFS, it can be accessed by only one virtual machine. However, Melio clustered file system can be installed on the virtual machines and used to provide shared access to application data volumes, enabling concurrent read and write access from multiple physical or virtual servers.

Key advantages of shared access to application data from guest servers:

  • Multiple paths to the data for availability

  • Multiple virtual servers to run the same application using the same data for scalability

  • High performance shared data for multi-tier applications

Sanbolic Products

  • Melio Clustered File System
    Melio FS is an enterprise clustered file system that installs easily on Windows physical or virtual servers and provides concurrent shared access to SAN storage resources.

  • LaScala Clustered Volume Manager
    LaScala is a clustered volume manager designed for managing shared storage volumes.

Solution Briefs

White Papers

Best Practice Guides

Demos

Videos

  • Failover Clustering with Sanbolic Kayo FS
    This video is Part 9 of a TechNet series and demonstrates the integration of Sanbolic's Kayo FS with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and thus the enabling of multiple VMs per LUN, with the added benefit of individual migration and failover.

Press Releases

Case Studies

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