With guest attached volumes, it’s easy to crank up the frequency of snapshot and replica protection on just the data, without interfering with the VM that is serving up the data. Thanks to the independent volume(s), one can easily see with SANHQ what the requirements of that data volume is. My “in the trenches” experience with the guest attached volumes in VM’s running Microsoft OS’s (and EqualLogic’s HIT/ME) have proven that recovering data off of guest attached volumes is just easier – whether you recover it from snapshot or replica, clone it for analysis, etc. Having the data as guest attached means that you can easily prepare a new VM presenting the data (via NFS, Samba, etc.), and cut it over without anyone knowing – especially when you are using DNS aliasing. Often times, systems serving up large volumes of unstructured data are hard to update. The VM can easily fit in your standard VMFS volumes. It keeps the footprint of the VM really small.What’s the big deal about guest attached volumes? Well, here is why I like them. The HIT/ME and HIT/LE offer unique features when using guest attached volumes in your VM’s. I’ve been a big fan of Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for Microsoft (HIT/ME), so I was looking forward to seeing how the newly released HIT for Linux (HIT/LE) was going to pan out.
