VMware ESXi 6.7 + SUSE Enterprise Storage = Certified

I’m proud to be able to say that SUSE has just completed the certification process for using SUSE Enterprise Storage via iSCSI with VMware ESXi 6.7.  Accompanying this certification, we have also produced and released an integration guide outlining some key settings along with some architectural decisions that need to be carefully considered.  With these two happenings, customers can deploy infrastructure with confidence that all components are fully supported.

This also means that SUSE Enterprise Storage allows customers to implement a scalable and flexible storage tier for the bulk of their VMware infrastructure.  This shrinks the footprint required for traditional, more expensive, storage appliances to high-performance and very specialized use cases.  When trying to assess whether a use case is high-performance or not, the important characteristics are those that are challenging for a virtualized environment to start with, such as high sustained throughput or very low latency requirements.  This is not to say that SUSE Enterprise Storage is slow (See our IO500 showings for HPC), but rather that iSCSI is a traditional technology with bottlenecks involving locking and things like fan-in ratios for clients per gateway that must be accounted for.

SUSE Enterprise Storage brings significant value to enterprise storage infrastructure in other ways as well.  These include providing both, an object (S3/Swift) store and distributed file system, that can scale into the exabytes.  These can be leveraged for a variety of tasks needed as companies move into more modern infrastructures, full of containers and driven by analytics and machine learning.  With the ability to separate storage in logical pools, it’s completely possible for a single cluster to have flash nodes servicing VMware workloads and spinning storage servicing a 100PB content store.

If you’d like to discuss using SUSE Enterprise Storage in your environment to achieve extreme scalability, flexibility, and cost savings, reach out to your SUSE representative today!