As the virtualization market heats up and becomes more competitive, it's more important than ever to invest in proven intelligent data infrastructure solutions that meet the demands of modern private and hybrid clouds.
ONTAP is the ideal platform for hosting data for virtual machines, not just because of the peace of mind of our guarantee programs:
- Ransomware recovery guarantee
- Six nines data availability (99.9999%)
- Storage efficiency guarantees (4:1 on SAN, 3:1 for vSphere, Hyper-V, and KVM-based workloads on NAS)
Nor because of our Storage Lifecycle Program that makes it easy to keep your hardware upgraded to current standards.
But because we test and certify nearly all of the major (and some up-and-coming) hypervisors, you can have peace of mind knowing whatever virtualization solution you choose, and I suspect that most mid-size and larger businesses will adopt a multi-hypervisor strategy, you can rest assured your data lives on the most tested and trusted solution available.
Jeff Baxter made a great blog post about the NetApp guarantees here: NetApp Advance: Invest in a storage infrastructure that evolves with you
I've often spoken and blogged about our over 20-year strategic alliance with VMware and our deep integration for provisioning and lifecycle management, data protection, disaster recovery, monitoring, and troubleshooting. We also have deep ties and long-standing friendships across the industry.
Some key examples include:
Microsoft: Not only is Azure NetApp Files (ANF) the only 1st party enterprise-grade datastore solution available for use with Azure VMware Solution (AVS), but we've continued to test and certify Microsoft Hyper-V, both as a standalone server (now discontinued) and as a core Windows role, since 2008. NetApp Cloud Insights supports Hyper-V, and the re-introduced NetApp SMI-S Provider integrates dynamic storage management for both SAN and NAS with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Many third-party backup partners also support integrating ONTAP snapshot and SnapMirror support for fully optimized array-native backup and recovery. ONTAP remains the only data infrastructure system that allows native copy offload between SAN and NAS for flexibility and storage consumption, and ONTAP also offers native space reclamation across both NAS (SMB3 TRIM over SMB/CIFS) and SAN (iSCSI and FCP with SCSI UNMAP) protocols.
Red Hat: Red Hat has recently been making waves with the rapidly evolving Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (RHOS-V) solution. Based on the upstream KubeVirt project, it lets you instantiate KVM-based virtual machines and manage them as K8s pods. The most exciting aspect of this technology from an intelligent data infrastructure perspective is that it supports the Container Storage Interface (CSI) standard. RHOS-V, together with the NetApp Astra Trident CSI, allows you to dynamically manage storage over NFS, iSCSI, and NVMe/TCP in a way that is both VM-granular, and classful, while allowing all of the great things that ONTAP has to offer, like rapid cloning, snapshots, and replication. Fibre-channel is also available directly to the RHOS-V cluster nodes and qualified on the NetApp Interoperability Matrix Tool (IMT). You can check out some of our RHOS-V solutions here.
You can think of KubeVirt-based VMs using PVCs like how VMware vSphere VMs use vVols. Except you would be using Astra Trident instead of ONTAP tools for VMware as the glue between the hypervisor and the storage.
Of course, you can still use KVM as a core feature of Red Hat Linux, just as you can use Hyper-V as a core feature of Windows. Support is possible across all normal data protocols, and includes things like offloaded copy (sg_copy), space reclamation (SCSI UNMAP), etc...
KVM is generally supported on ONTAP per the parent Linux distro, simply refer to the IMT for the reference Linux.
SUSE Harvester offers similar capabilities. They've posted and article on how to integrate Harvester with Trident here:
Using NetApp Storage on Harvester
Google Anthos, similarly using hypervisor technology based on upstream KubeVirt, supports VMs managed by NetApp Astra Trident as well.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and OpenStack in general is also an incredible private cloud solution and the fact that the NetApp Unified Driver is baked into the upstream OpenStack code means that NetApp data management integration is built right in. Meaning, there is nothing to install! Storage management functions support NVMe, iSCSI or FC for block protocols, and NFS for NAS. Thin provisioning, dynamic storage management, copy offload, and snapshots are all supported natively.
Proxmox VE is another option that we've gotten a lot of questions about. It is an up-and-coming virtualization solution based on KVM with its own management plane that makes it easier to implement. There are already rows in the IMT supporting Proxmox VE with iSCSI, NFS v3, v4.1, and v4.2, and our friends over at Credativ wrote a great blog post on it:
Did you know that Credativ maintains an Open Source Support Center that can provide support for ProxMox? Read more about it here: Open Source Support Center | Our support for free software - credativ®
Oh, and did I mention that ONTAP can do zero-copy in-place migrations between hypervisors?
Come by and see me NetApp Insight in Las Vegas, NV, September 23-24, 2004, and visit me in sessions 1050, 1452, and 1579, and don't forget to check out my friends in session 1208 to learn more about zero-copy hypervisor flexibility.
If there are any other hypervisors you use, or are considering using, and have any questions about this blog post, just at me in the comments section below and I'll reply as soon as possible.