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This chapter discusses storage provisioning on the Dell PowerMax in a VMware environment and provides recommendations around VMware disk types.
One of the biggest challenges facing storage administrators is provisioning storage for new applications. Administrators typically allocate space considering anticipated future growth of applications. This allocation is done to mitigate recurring operational functions, such as incrementally increasing storage allocations or adding discrete blocks of storage as existing space is consumed. Using this approach results in more physical storage being allocated to the application than needed for a significant amount of time. It also comes at a higher cost than necessary. The overprovisioning of physical storage also leads to increased power, cooling, and floor space requirements. Even with the most careful planning, it may be necessary to provision additional storage in the future, which could potentially require an application outage.
A second layer of storage overprovisioning happens when a server and application administrator over allocate storage for their environment. The operating system identifies the space as completely allocated but internally only a fraction of the allocated space is used.
Dell PowerMax Virtual Provisioning (aka virtual provisioning) can address both of these issues. Virtual provisioning allows more storage to be presented to an application than is physically available. More importantly, Virtual Provisioning allocates physical storage only when the storage is written to or when purposely preallocated by an administrator. This feature allows more flexibility in predicting future growth, and reduces the initial costs of provisioning storage to an application. It can obviate the inherent waste in over-allocation of space and administrative management of subsequent storage allocations.
Dell PowerMax storage arrays continue to provide increased storage utilization and optimization, enhanced capabilities, and greater interoperability and security. Virtual provisioning is known in the industry as “thin provisioning.” Implementing it for these arrays enables organizations to improve ease of use, enhance performance, and increase capacity utilization for certain applications and workloads. The PowerMax storage arrays are designed and configured for a one-hundred percent virtually provisioned environment.