Support for Microsoft Hyper-V

As customers incorporate cloud management technologies as part of their infrastructure, mixed hypervisor environments are becoming pervasive. IDC recently surveyed 202 companies with more than 1000 employees. Of those, 59 percent indicated they have multiple hypervisors in their environments. Market research firm Enterprise Strategy Group’s survey of 440 IT reports that 65 percent of its respondents were using more than one hypervisor.

Given these market trends, we’ve recently announced the technology preview for our support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and today we are proud to announce the technology preview for our support for Microsoft Hyper-V, continuing our journey that started with bringing hypervisor-agnostic application-aware storage to virtualized environments and private cloud deployments on VMware vSphere. Tintri support for Hyper-V is currently in technology preview and will be generally available in the 2nd half of 2014.

Not all storage is created equal for running Hyper-V workloads:

Many traditional storage vendors claim they support multiple hypervisors. However, support for any hypervisor is a meaningless claim without native VM-level visibility and data management – snapshots, clones, replication, and quality of service (QoS). Tintri’s Hyper-V support differs from that of traditional storage systems on many dimensions –

1. Tintri brings to Hyper-V the advantages of our FlashFirst™ architecture to deliver 99% all IOs from flash delivering high performance at consistent sub-millisecond latencies cost effectively.
2. Native integration with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Hyper-V Manager offers VM-level visibility and control.
3. Instantly identify performance hot spots at the hypervisor, network and storage level with comprehensive end-to-end performance visualization.  
4. All data management functionality–snapshots, clones, and replication–is at VM-level for efficient usage of storage and network resources.
5. Tintri is optimized for running enterprise applications on Hyper-V with superior performance and reliability. Just as we have optimized our NFS server implementation to suit virtualized environments, we have implemented an optimized Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 protocol stack to deliver the best performance and reliability in Hyper-V environments.
6. Optimal use of infrastructure with support for technologies such as Offloaded Data Transfers (ODX) for getting the best of both worlds – drive workflows from SCVMM while leveraging the efficiency of Tintri VM-level data management functionality.
7. Deploy mixed workloads—server, VDI, and dev & test—concurrently with VM-level quality-of-service (QoS). With smart storage that sees, learns, and adapts, Tintri enables IT to focus on virtualized apps instead of managing storage infrastructure.

Hyper-V for VMware users

Let us look at some of the similarities and the differences between Hyper-V and vSphere. At an architectural view Hyper-V looks very similar to vSphere, but there are some differences under the covers. Let’s start with a component by component comparison:

• SCVMM/ vCenter: The System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) manages a number of Hyper-V hosts (Windows Servers) with a UI for managing a cluster. It can be run in a VM or on a physical machine. Additionally, each Hyper-V host can be managed independently using Hyper-V Manager.
• Window Server / ESX or ESXi: Hyper-V is a server role on Windows Server whereas ESX or ESXi is the hypervisor in vSphere.
• SMB share / Datastore: Hyper-V stores disk images in SMB share, which serve the same role as datastores in vSphere. The VMs inside the SMB shares, however, are structured differently compared to Hyper-V than VMs in datastores by vSphere.
• ODX / VAAI: ODX allows users to create clone VMs from SCVMM by leveraging Tintri space efficient clones just as vSphere API for Array Integration (VAAI) allows leveraging Tintri space efficient clones from vCenter.

Under the hood:

Let us take a look at the high level deployment architectural view of Tintri’s integration into Hyper-V environments. Conceptually, many of the elements found in our integration into vSphere environments exist in our Hyper-V integration as well, but there are differences in both the components and how we integrate with those components the context of Hyper-V.

• Purpose built SMB 3.0 stack provides data services for storing VMs and VHDX files.
• SCVMM integration via Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) provides SMB share management and ODX support for offloading storage operations.
• Hyper-V manager integration via Windows Management Interface (WMI) enables association of storage constructs with VMs and virtual disks.
• Kerberos support for authentication through Active Directory.

Run mixed workloads from multiple hypervisors concurrently:

Tintri’s fundamental value is application-awareness that is hypervisor agnostic, so VMs with varying resources needs (IOPS, latency, application characteristics, etc.) from multiple hypervisors can be concurrently run on a single VMstore while leveraging VM-level data management and visibility.

Experience the same application-aware data management functionality-see performance and capacity statistics create and manage Tintri space-efficient snapshots, zero space clones, and configure replication-at a VM-level across all the hypervisors are all fundamental part of Tintri VMstore systems. Moreover, run mixed workloads—server, VDI, and dev & test—on multiple hypervisors, concurrently with VM-level quality-of-service (QoS). With VM-level QoS functionality, storage performance is equitable and predictable.  

By removing the language barriers that exist between virtualization and storage components of the infrastructure, Tintri VMstore systems provide a unifying experience in managing the end-to-end infrastructure in the language of VMs and applications.

Attending TechEd next week?

Tintri is a proud sponsor of the event and we’d be pleased to see you at Booth #109. Stop by the booth to see Hyper-V in action and to lean how our products can help you run your virtualized environments and private cloud deployments.