Legacy software

by Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO

Posted Saturday, July 04, 2009 in News          2 comments

Tags: false assumptions, Symantec

As a founder of Virsto, part of my job is to be absolutely convinced that problems we've set out to solve are fundamental, difficult to solve, and important to large numbers of customers. It is very satisfying to find others sharing my views. I recently came across a series of posts by Jerome Wendt on storage management in Microsoft Hyper-V virtual servers.

Jerome correctly identifies some of the problems customer face when configuring Hyper-V installations for real life scalable usage in a data center. The fact is that Hyper-V storage management functionality is scarce at best. In the upcoming 2008 R2 release, Microsoft plugged some of the most gaping holes by introducing clustered shared volumes (CSVs), but Hyper-V still remains woefully inadequate when it comes to storage management.

Jerome correctly points out that life could be a lot easier if customers install Symantec Storage Foundation (SF) for Windows in the Hyper-V parent partition. Specifically, he talks about the I/O path balancing and redundancy features of the SF and superior utilization of thinly provisioned volumes.

I spent a lot of exciting years at VERITAS Software where I was fortunate to design and lead the development of major components of what is now known as Storage Foundation. The concept of introducing a hypervisor-resident storage management layer seems to me (and my other ex-VERITAS colleagues) very natural. So with a certain level of surprise I read that "...In this particular case, Symantec with the assistance of its customers in EMEA, accidentally (emphasis mine) discovered the breakthrough that will make Microsoft Hyper-V a much more viable alternative to the VMware ESX server..."

Accidentally? This discovery was an accident prompted by a customer's use of SF in an unsupported configuration? Is hoping for serendipity what Symantec calls innovation these days? Oh, how far the once-mighty have fallen.

However after some thinking I realized that my surprise was misplaced. How many times since VERITAS was acquired by Symantec have I seen the gross mismanagement of VERITAS technology? Way too many. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that Symantec was effectively asleep at the wheel while driving the VERITAS Storage Foundation direction.

One also should not forget the VERITAS SF for Windows was conceived and designed more than a dozen years ago, and has basically been in maintenance mode ever since. (No doubt someone from Symantec is going to object to that statement, but please, the engineers who wrote it know I'm speaking the truth.) x86 virtual servers and their unique storage problems didn't exist back in mid 90s.

Hyper-V customers will need a lot more than a re-purposed progeny of the 90s to bring Hyper-V up to the standard set by VMware vSphere, let alone to solve the hard problems of storage in the new virtual world.