When VMware introduced some of the storage API’s, some of the more important ones were around storage. I don’t say this because I am a storage guy, but more because this is an area that frequently causes problems for virtualization. When VMware released their backup API, features such as Change Block Tracking, CBT, became particularly compelling. Now vSphere could tell the backup software what had changed since the last backup, rather than relying on the backup catalog to look at everything. This created less reads on the storage, and more effecient.

It was not a huge leap then when vSphere replication was released as a standalone product separate from Site Recovery Manager, SRM, as well as a function of SRM. Prior to this, vSphere would rely on the underlying storage to do the replication, but now replication could be handled by vSphere itself.

One of the challenges with replication has traditionally been bandwith. To handle this we have used compression, caching, deduplication, and sending only the changed data to the remote site. When VMware introduced CBT for backups, this enabled them to later release replication using the CBT technology since they were already tracking changes and could use those for replication as well as backups. This would like like the diagram below.

 

In the previous post, Software Defined Storage Replication, the discussion was around abstraction through a third party product, in our case the HP StoreVirtual VSA. In this case, we are looking at a built in product. Much like VSAN, this is a solid way of doing things, but the challange comes in because it only replicates vSphere, unlike 3rd party products.

The other consideration here is the efficiency of doing things in software versus hardware. Of course the abstraction does have efficiencies from an operational sense, management is built in to the vSphere console, and you are not tied to a specific storage vendor. On the other side, we do need to look at the inherent performance benefits of replicating between two block storage arrays. Anytime we do anything in hardware, it is going to naturally be faster.

One thing VMware has done very well is providing solutions based in software to compete with hardware vendors. This does not mean that VMware does not partner with hardware vendors, but for some customers the price is right for this. VMware almost always tells us to use array based replication for maximum performance, but this is a good solution for abstraction or a smaller environment where cost is a larger factor over performance.