Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5 on NetApp Data ONTAP

This updated technical report Best Practices for Vmware vSphere 5 covers 3 main areas

1. How the new and updated technologies from VMware and NetApp enable you to virtualize demanding business-critical applications
2. The role of the best practice TR as it relates to the rest of the joint VMware and NetApp solutions documents in the NetApp technical library
3. How to enable coordinated and automated cross-domain operations where resources are consumed dynamically while complying with operational standards

 Interesting Extraction from the article


With VMware vSphere 5 you can deploy “monster VMs”—virtual machines configured with a maximum of 32 virtual CPUs and 1TB of memory. To put the new configurations of a “monster VM” in perspective, in vSphere 4.1 a virtual machine was limited to 8 virtual CPUs and 255GB of memory. The VMware engineering team has outdone itself in delivering such an increase in computing capacity.

NetApp has also enhanced the performance of the dedupe intelligence within the storage caches of its arrays. Dedupe-aware storage controller cache is unique to NetApp and is a feature that we developed and brought to market specifically for use with server virtualization. If you’re familiar with the performance benefits of VMware Transparent Page Sharing, then just imagine that technology in the cache of a storage array. NetApp is the only array that allows data cached from one VM to be accessed when servicing a subsequent request by another VM......

Interesting related technical report "NetApp Storage Best Practices for VMware vSphere" (pdf)