Issue link: http://hub-fr.insight.com/i/532074
57 ✓ Take advantage of the storage efficiencies of virtu- alization. For example, on a traditional physical server, adding or reconfiguring disk drives is diffi- cult, time consuming, constrained by available drive bays and can sometimes result in downtime or data loss. In a virtual environment, physical storage devices are abstracted – seperated – from the virtual machine, so storage capacity can be added without affecting the VM in any way. Virtual disks, by the same token, can be easily expanded without requiring complex reconfigura- tion of physical storage devices. ✓ Choose thin or thick provisioning of virtual disks for individual VMs. Thick provisioning allocates all the space for a virtual disk the moment you create it; thin provisioning allocates space as nec- essary throughout the virtual disk's life. If you have a dedicated storage solution from a third party, there may also be thin provisioning availa- ble at the array hardware level as well. ✓ Using VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™, you can configure Storage I/O control to guarantee a certain amount of I/O resources for each virtual disk, or enable Storage I/O Control to provide equitable access to storage resources for all VMs. This ensures that no partic- ular workload will dominate the resources of any physical array.