This is a continuation of a series of articles on hosting solutions and services on Azure public cloud with the most recent discussion on Multitenancy here. The previous articles introduced virtual SAN followed by the operational efficiencies and this follows up on the design points and the use of Virtual SAN ready nodes.

Virtual SAN provides the ability to take operations down to the virtual machine level.  This fine-grain control is required from the application delivery perspective that matter most to enterprise IT users. Users are concerned about their applications and not about the infrastructure. HCI and vSAN recognize this requirement and are aligned with it. All storage services and the VM hosts that they reside on can be adjusted.

Storage systems have been traditionally defined to be application agnostic and providing multiple layers of abstraction over the raw bytes on the disk. The user facing organizational units differ from the storage facing ones and there is usually a table or a directory to map one with the other. When storage services are configured by application requirements rather than storage constraints, it gives greater control to the users.

More efficient operations are enabled with the use of storage policies to drive automation. The policies can be set for an application’s requirement on capacity, performance, availability, redundancy, and such others. The management control plane can automate the VM placement by finding the datastores that have capacity to provision them. Together the automation and policy-based management simplify storage management. It helps to quickly deliver value to the customers and those who use IT services.

It doesn’t mean application admin and storage admin can be one and the same. The former view the storage as a service without being slowed down by the service-fulfillment bottlenecks and might even expect a pay-as-you-go billing. The latter are primarily interested in automation and operational efficiencies. Similarly, virtual infrastructure administrators and storage administrators participate in a symbiotic relationship. Although they might be involved in a tug-of-war, software defined storage elminiates the reasons for it mostly with the help of storage policy based management. The storage admin is responsible for the upfront setup of the storage capacity and data services which are published as the so-called virtual datastore.  The Virtual Infrastructure admin uses the virtual datastore as a menu of storage items to serve the needs of the Virtual Machines.

No operational model is complete without unified management. IT operations have been dogged by swivel chair operation where the operator must jump from one interface to another to complete all aspects of a workflow. An HCI has the potential to provide a single pane of glass management instead of managing compute, storage and networking individually. Not al HCI provide this and some even come up with a mashup of underlying technology management but  seasoned HCI will  generally have a unified management. When it comes to HCI, system monitoring is critical to aid management. Although custom dashboards and historical trends might be available from metrics providers, a built-in monitoring system for an HCI goes hand in hand with its management portal. End-to-end monitoring and the whole picture of the software and its environment not helps with proactive monitoring but also troubleshooting and reducing costs