Storage System Design Scheme in Virtualization Construction

Abstract: In order to improve resource utilization, it is necessary to integrate storage and data, and the emergence of cloud

computing makes it possible. This paper analyzed the study of virtualization and cloud computing, proposed a new scheme based

on virtualization, and established a shared storage platform, which made a good complement and perfected the centralized storage

platform.

Key words: virtualization analysis, cloud computing, storage platform

CLC number: TP391 Document code: A Article ID: 1006-8104(2012)-04-0079-04

Introduction

Virtualization has become one of the main promoters of the modern data center, it can improve the resource utilization, system support options and the response ability, while cloud computing technology further promote its development, which makes it possible to provide on-demand configuration and scalability for the users, therefore, virtualization can be regarded as the basis of cloud computing. In computer technology, virtualization refers to abstract the physical resources, such as servers, network, and memory, and presents them after the conversions, so that the users can apply these resources in a better way than the original configuration. The new virtual parts of these resources are not restricted by the erection way of the existing resources and geographical or physical configura-tion. The virtualized resources generally include com-puting power and data storage (Bowker, 2011; Liao, 2006). 　Storage system is the most important part of vir-tualization, it is said that storage system is the key

factor of virtualization, because of its high availability and continuity. In virtualization construction, storage systems store various structured data such as databases produced in virtualization environment and a variety of text, images, sound, video, and other unstructured data files, as well as various environmental documents of the virtual machine. Storage systems not only store and backup all kinds of files, but also deal with a variety of data access requests. And the storage response ability to access directly affects the access speed and integrity of the entire virtualized environment. In the process of data access, the data need to provide access request through the network and then be processed by the physical host memory and CPU, when the users access to the data in the virtualized environment, the response ability provided by storage is far less than the physical host CPU and the memory capacity in the environment in the entire process of data flow. Network backbone transmission speed unit is Gigabit; memory bandwidth is generally six GBps; CPU processing power is even higher than the memory bandwidth. While memory bandwidth is generally just one MBps, it is lower than others. As can be seen, the storage is the bottleneck of

Received 26 February 2012Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (G201206)Si Zhenyu (1977-), male, Master, engaged in the research of computer network information. E-mail: zysi@neau.edu.cn

Si Zhen-yu

Network Information Center, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin 150030, China

Dec. 2012 Vol. 19 No. 4 79-82Journal of Northeast Agricultural University (English Edition) Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

http: //publish.neau.edu.cn

the whole environment, we must optimize the existing storage systems in order to improve the entire virtual environment (Johnson, 2008; Gulati, 2010).　A good system should not only be able to pro-vide fast and efficient storage service, but also has a perfect backup mechanism to deal with all kinds of accidents that may occur in the process of system running.　At present, in the construction process of virtualiza-tion, storage areas mainly use the centralized storage way at home and abroad, which unifies storage devices to store files in the virtual environment. It has achieved a rapid development mainly in the aspect of improving hardware storage performance, and produces a variety of advanced hardware storage technologies, such as the use of the solid-state storage media, the use of tiered storage, and reduplication data deletion technology, but the use of new technologies brings about increased construction cost, so there is a certain one-sidedness that singly improve the performance of storage hard-ware instead of increasing the entire storage system. If we take the virtualization construction cost into consideration, the feasibility will be greatly affected in the case of limited investment.

　Based on the current program of virtualization construction and implementation, this paper studied the defects of current centralized storage solution, and established a system storage solution program that fitted for the virtualization construction by optimizing infrastructure, improving service, integrating resources,and promoting application under the conditions of a certain cost control. The new storage system could beguaranted to meet the requirements of storage securityand continuity, and the storage and backup of virtual machine's structured and unstructured files under the virtualization environment.

Storage System Design in Virtualiza-tion Construction

Defects of current centralized storage solution The storage system design of virtualization construc-tion is mainly centralized storage, and then set up a backup disaster recovery equipment, centralized storage is generally as much as possible with more advanced storage technologies, such as automated tiered storage, reduplication data deletion, and high-speed solid state storage devices (Fig. 1).

FC storage iSCSIstorage

NASstorage

Managerserver

Managerclient

Storage network

FC switchFabricIP network

ProductionnetworkManagementnetwork

Webbrowser

Virtualization layer

VM VM VM VM VM

Fig. 1 Virtualization centralized storage structure

　As shown in Fig. 1, there are several virtual machines are running and provide services above the

virtual host, they provide a variety of services, and all point to the centralized storage, the centralized

E-mail: xuebaoenglish@neau.edu.cn

Journal of Northeast Agricultural University (English Edition)·80· Vol. 19 No. 4 2012

storage platforms generally use iSCSI, SAN or NAS to storage. Virtual host does not have storage function, when the virtual host fails, all the data are not in the local, but in the storage platform, so we can move virtual machines on other physical host quickly to restore and run, so as to achieve high availability, high persistence, and high security. Backup storage platform can provide backup of centralized storage platform to maintain data recoverability.　The virtual machine in the virtual architecture system is actually packaged into a file and a number of related environment configuration files, which are stored in the file system of the SAN memory array and can be accessed by the virtual machines in different services, in this way, we can eliminate the cases of unavailable application system resulted by single point failure (Han, 2011). For instance, a virtual machine can provide web access services, numbers of website file directories are stored in this machine, when the virtual machine works, the website file directories and other files stored in it are integrated into a large

capacity and special file, and it will be a great loss if there is an accident. This design is reasonable but not comprehensive, because it saves the virtual machine files, which are one or more large files, including the structured and unstructured documents generated by the running virtual machine, if there is a failure in thislarge file, the useful data will be very difficult to recover.

Hardware and software environments of new storage system The new storage system is designed based on the existing centralized storage system architecture, in addition to the existing network and storage equipment, a NAS storage equipment is combined, which must satisfy the condition that every virtual machine can access to it and have written to the storage rights, what's more, in order to ensure the system safety, it is better to have a independent network address which is different from the management network and the centralized storage. The new storage system design is shown in Fig. 2.

Design of new storage systemDesign ideas: in addition to storing the virtual machine environment files, the new storage system store and backup the files in the virtual machine.

　Solution: to solve the problem, we need to build a shared storage platform specifically for the virtual machine to access, which stores files by NAS or iSCSI way. When the virtual machine works, the structured and unstructured data files produced by it will be

FC storage iSCSIstorage

NASstorage

Managerserver

Managerclient

Storage network

FC switchFabricIP network

Productionnetwork

Managementnetwork

Webbrowser

Virtualization layer

Fig. 2 New storage system architecture design

NASstorage

VM

VM

VM

VM

VM

http: //publish.neau.edu.cn

Si Zhen-yu. Storage System Design Scheme in Virtualization Construction ·81·

stored in the shared storage platform and become real files from virtual ones. Thus, the existing centralized storage platform and the shared storage platform form a more complete storage platform, the single large file of the virtual machine environment is stored in the centralized storage platform, and all kinds of structured and unstructured files produced by the running virtual machine can be stored in the shared storage platform, based on it, all data can be saved and restored.　Through the above structure, it can be seen that in the process of virtualization construction, the new storage system can not only intently store the separate files of the virtual machine, but also store all files by the NAS storage device, which has high availability and integrity.

Conclusions

By the way of building a shared storage platform to store various files in the virtual machine, we converted these files into physical ones and provided a comprehensive storage system, which supplemented and improved the centralized storage platform. After the implementation of virtualization, all files in the

virtual machine or produced by it could be found on the storage platform, which provided a good protection for virtualization construction. This storage system could provide better base and powerful reference for the future virtualization construction and even the cloud computing construction and implementation.

ReferencesBowker D. 2011. Animal record management using an embedded RFID-

based system. The 118th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition.

Gulati A. 2010. Modeling workloads and devices for load balancing

in virtualized environments. The 2nd Workshop on Hot Topics in

Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems.

Han Q, Bao W. 2011. A halal and quality attributes driven animal

products formal producing system based on HQESPNM. The 4th IFIP

International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies

in Agriculture and the 4th Symposium on Development of Rural

Information.

Johnson A K. 2008. Setting the farm animal welfare science in North

America. The 8th International Livestock Environment Symposium.

Iguassu Falls, Brazil.

Liao A H. 2006. A 3D registration method for US/PET multi-modality

small animal tumor imaging. IEEE International Ultrasonics

Symposium.

E-mail: xuebaoenglish@neau.edu.cn

Journal of Northeast Agricultural University (English Edition)·82· Vol. 19 No. 4 2012