A proper storage design provides the basis for a virtual data center that performs well.
- The storage design must be optimized to meet the diverse needs of applications, services, administrators, and users.
- Tiers of storage have different performance, capacity, and availability characteristics.
- Designing different storage tiers is cost efficient, because not every application requires expensive, high-performance, highly available storage.
- Fibre Channel, NFS, and iSCSI are mature and viable options to support virtual machine needs.
The following illustration shows how different types of hosts take advantage of different storage arrays. Hosts in the management cluster need storage for management, monitoring, and portals. Hosts in the edge cluster need storage that the customer can access. A host in the payload cluster has access to customer-specific storage. Different payload cluster hosts have access to different storage.
The storage administrator can manage all storage, however, the storage administrator does not have access to customer data.
