Owner's manual

Picking the Right I/O Pieces, and Making Them Work Together
Tier-1 applicaons are uniquely demanding in many dimensions. Their needs with respect to CPU power,
memory footprint, high availability/failover, resiliency, and responsiveness to outside smuli is typically
unmatched within the enterprise. Moreover, Tier-1 applicaons also tend to be ghtly integrated with other
applicaons and resources within the enterprise. Because of this, virtualizing a Tier-1 applicaon requires
rigorous planning of the I/O strategy. There are ve steps to follow:
 Idenfy the I/O fabrics that the Tier-1 applicaons will use (it may very well be “all of them”).
 Quanfy the data ows for each fabric when the applicaon was operang on a standalone system.
 Esmate Live Migraon I/O needs for failovers and evoluon. Note that most Live Migraon trac will
be storage I/O; if the data stays within one external array during the Live Migraon, Microso’s ODX
capability can signicantly reduce the I/O trac.
 Determine your primary and secondary I/O paths for mul-pathing on all of your networks.
 Determine QoS levels for the Tier-1 apps.
One simplifying opon available is to ulize Converged Network Adapters that can funcon on both Fibre
Channel and Ethernet/FCoE networks. The QLogic QLE2672 is an example of such an adapter; it can be
recongured in the eld to operate on Gen 5 Fibre Channel or 10Gb FCoE/Ethernet networks.
Virtualized I/O
Business-crical applicaons, such as ERP, CRM, eCommerce,
and e-mail need high-performance and high-availability I/O
infrastructure to meet business SLAs.
Tier-1 Apps
Networking Considerations When Virtualizing Tier-1 Applications