Question about user storage and vSphere (or Hyper-V)

tdean

if you have a virtualized environment and are using a SAN for all storage, how do users save docs etc to their home directories? in a "regular" client/server environment, as admin, you can set it up via gpo so they can just auto save to their home dir, but thats on a physical server. how do you set something up if the storage is on an iSCSI network? isnt that usually on a completely different subnet?

MentholMoose

When a user is logged into a VM, the back-end storage is invisible to them. It looks no different than if they were logged onto a physical PC. This is completely handled by the hypervisor. Users can save files to their profile inside the VM, and it doesn't matter where the virtual disk actually resides (be it a SAN, NAS, or local storage on the host). For SAN or NAS, it only has to be accessible to the host, and not necessarily to VMs.

That is just one scenario, though. You may not want users saving files inside VMs. For example you can enable folder redirection, so files will be saved on a network share somewhere (for example, a share you create on another VM, which may or may not reside on SAN storage) instead of locally. Or use roaming profiles, so data is stored locally at first, but later copied to a network share.

tdean

thanks MM, so in the case of folder redirection, the user would be saving to their mapped drive or home dir and the name of it would reflect the vm? then the vm hypervisor would redirect it to the storage device?

i guess im just wondering how this process is "invisible" to the end users. i mean, if i can get them to understand the concept of locking their machine when they get up, im gonna have a tough time selling to them the next time they want to save a file it goes to 2020-01.com.companydomain:iscsi1 instead on "tdean".

EDIT: one more thing, the "NAS" or storage is a separate machine, while the datastores/vms are typically spread across a couple different ESXi/Hyper-V servers?

hypnotoad

The iscsi drive comes up as any other path in the system, it can appear as a drive letter or a file path, so the user doesn't have to know any bizarre iscsi path

MentholMoose

tdean wrote: »

thanks MM, so in the case of folder redirection, the user would be saving to their mapped drive or home dir and the name of it would reflect the vm? then the vm hypervisor would redirect it to the storage device?

i guess im just wondering how this process is "invisible" to the end users. i mean, if i can get them to understand the concept of locking their machine when they get up, im gonna have a tough time selling to them the next time they want to save a file it goes to 2020-01.com.companydomain:iscsi1 instead on "tdean".

The underlying storage where a VM is stored is not just invisible to users, it is invisible to VMs. A VM sees a virtual disk attached to it as a physical disk, regardless of where it is stored (SAN/NAS/local). So as far as shares and mapped drives, it looks no different than if you were using physical machines.

tdean wrote: »

EDIT: one more thing, the "NAS" or storage is a separate machine, while the datastores/vms are typically spread across a couple different ESXi/Hyper-V servers?

VMs can be stored on SAN/NAS space (i.e. shared storage), and run on various servers. If they are stored on a particular host, it can only run on that particular host.

tdean

thanks guys. that explains it.