Evaluation of different SAN Technologies for virtual machine hosting

This thesis covers a problem which companies faces every day: Finding a Storage Area Network(SAN) solution that tackles the rising demands from users and their software and when working with virtualization environments. In this paper it will be showed a way to investigate and identify, from a selection of SAN technologies, which is the most efficient and optimal based on scenarios that fits real life experiences. The approach taken was to create an experimental setup in a controlled environment that fits real life experience. The benchmark tool bonnie++ was used to simulate activity and interpreted by an analysis script tool developed by the author. Distributed Replicated Block Device(DRBD), Network File System(NFS), Parallel Virtual File System(PVFS), Internet SCSI(ISCSI) and ATA over Ethernet(AoE) are the SAN technologies which will be evaluated and discussed. The optimal SAN technologies will be chosen based on a certain criterias such as raw performance and stability