SUSE Enterprise Storage – Virtual Machine Use Case

Everyone is talking about how Software Defined Storage, powered by open source Ceph technology is redefining the storage market. It allows corporations to create a highly scalable storage infrastructure with commodity, off-the-shelf (COTS) servers and disk drives.

SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) allows you to add, remove or replace OSD nodes on the fly, without bringing the storage cluster down.

Another major differentiator is SUSE’s first-to-market support of the iSCSI/Multi-path protocol which allows not only Linux, but UNIX and Windows servers to access the block storage created from a SUSE Enterprise Storage cluster.

But did you know that the most frequent Ceph use case involves providing block device images to virtual machines?

IT departments can set up an ideal configuration of a particular operating system environment, that includes any relevant software. Once set up, a “golden” image can be created and a snapshot taken to be cloned over and over as workload demands increase.

This ability to make copy-on-write clones of a snapshot means that Ceph can provision block device images to virtual machines quickly. This is an ideal scenario as the client does not need to download an entire image each time IT needs to spin up a new virtual machine. SUSE Enterprise Storage not only saves money, it saves time too!