Providing storage to meet the requirements of virtualized environments
With the explosion of virtualized environments within recent years, a growing challenge for administrators has been to accommodate the storage requirements for a sprawling number of virtual machines. As enterprise QNAP NAS are designed for virtualized and clustered environments, they provide cost-effective and high-performance storage solutions for meeting the needs of virtualization.
Virtualization applications supported by QNAP NAS
QNAP NAS supports a wide range of mainstream virtualization applications in order to help IT administrators increase the efficiency of virtualized environments in their organization.
VMware vSphere
VMware® vSphere™ is the industry's first cloud operating system that offers one way to reduce IT costs and increase responsiveness. QNAP VMware® Ready™ products have been certified as compatible with the VMware®vSphere™ virtualization platform. IT administrators of small businesses and workgroups can now use a QNAP VMware® Ready™ NAS as an affordable and powerful storage solution in VMware® virtualized environments.
VAAI
VMware vSphere® Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) offloads specific storage operations for improved performance and efficiency. With a QNAP NAS and VAAI, standard virtual machine management operations and deployment can be performed faster, using less ESXi CPU, memory and bandwidth.
QNAP NAS supports VAAI for iSCSI and VAAI for NAS. VAAI for iSCSI supports Full Copy (hardware-assisted copy), Block Zeroing (hardware-assisted zeroing), Hardware-assisted Locking, and Thin Provisioning with Space Reclamation. VAAI for NAS supports Full File Clone, Extended Statistics, and Reserve Space.
Microsoft Hyper-V
Windows Server® 2012 R2 Hyper-V® (the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology) is available as integral features of Windows Server® and allows administrators to easily implement server virtualization. All of the QNAP Windows Server® 2012 R2 certified products and Hyper-V® compatible products have built-in iSCSI service and are compliant with SPC-3 persistent reservation for Windows Failover Cluster and Cluster Shared Volume. You can enjoy the interoperability between the Hyper-V® and QNAP NAS.
Microsoft Offloaded Data Transfer
Offloaded data transfer (ODX) in Windows Server® 2012 R2 allows users to accomplish more with a NAS by letting them quickly move large files and virtual machines directly between iSCSI disks, reducing host CPU and network resource usage. When used with QNAP NAS, ODX lets a storage device perform a file copy operation without the main processor of the host actually reading the content from one storage place and writing it to another.
With the support of Windows 2012® R2 Hyper-V® thin provisioning automatic space reclamation, when files in a VM are deleted, the space reclamation process is done automatically. It maximizes the storage usage efficiency and eliminates the time of administrative tasks.
Citrix XenServer
Citrix® XenServer™ is the only enterprise-class, cloud-proven server virtualization platform that delivers critical features such as live migration and centralized multi-server management at no cost. QNAP Citrix® Ready™products have passed the Citrix® verification.
| QNAP Turbo NAS is a virtualization-ready storage solution | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Virtualization solutions | VMware vSphere | Microsoft Hyper-V | Citrix XenServer |
| Certifications | VMware Ready | Certified for Windows 2012 R2 | Citrix Ready |
| Virtualization application | VAAI for iSCSI
| Microsoft ODX (Offload Data Transfer) | iSCSI and NFS Storage Repository |
VAAI for NAS
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| Management tool | QNAP vSphere Client plug-in |
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