VMware and LeftHand Networks up the virtualization ante with a joint offering Last week, at VMworld Europe in beautiful Cannes, LeftHand was showing, I am told, the Virtualization Solution Kits (VSK), a joint offering with VMware that promises to bring together the best of virtualization to SMBs and beyond.I had to skip Cannes this time, but I installed in my lab the nuts and bolts of the kit. Essentially, the solution kits offer well calibrated doses of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and LeftHand VSA, Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware. For the full scoop on the products involved, peruse the press release. Is this a technical announcement introducing major new features from either vendor? No, not really. The thrust of the announcement is on packaging and price, but this is one of those rare instances where an otherwise costly and untamed collection of software gets morphed into a suitable solution. Price is a factor. For example, the lower rung of the four packages, which is aimed at entry-level customers, includes two VI and one VSA and sells for about $7,000, much less than what we would have paid for VI3 alone. Obviously, having prepackaged options makes it easier to choose what best fits your requirements, but you still get separate installation media. What other benefits besides a lower price and one-purchase packaging can you get with one of the VSKs? It depends on what rung of that ladder you stop at, but in general the four VSKs make possible consolidating all your storage infrastructure in homogeneous VI3 data stores. Moreover, using VSA tools facilitates implementing reliable, multi-site SANs based on those data stores. It takes quite a few steps, too many to show them all, to achieve those results but the installation process challenges admins to master two powerful and fun-to-use sets of products. Here is an example of the flexibility of ESX. After uploading three LeftHand virtual storage modules, this is what my ESX data store looked like. You may notice that clicking on “add to inventory” immediately creates a new VM from the VSA disk image, leaving only a few details such as networking and disk space to be refined manually. On the LeftHand side, after powering on those VMs, you can control them from the user-friendly Management Console running from non-dedicated Linux or Windows VMs, for example. It’s worth restating that those VMs are the potential nodes of local or multi-site storage clusters, which means that with the proper infrastructure you can build a level of resilience able to fail over on a remote site if, for instance, there is a blackout at the main location. Needless to say, a volume built on a multi-site cluster and assisted by replicas and snapshots becomes very hard to kill, and makes for an ultra-reliable storage complement for critical applications. Even with that incentive, the thought of blending two virtualization products can be scary and with good reason: The two solutions are packaged together for convenience but still remain separate administrative domains. Properly configured, however, each solution lends some of its strength to the other, extending, for example, the HA of VI3 servers to support and receive support from the clustered resilience of VSA. You can get more from one of those kits than from the sum of its parts, but it will take time and effort.