After my previous post “Stop The Crave For Useless Cool Features“ I had some interesting discussions on the matter with colleagues of mine whom I find very intelligent. Most of them indeed responded to the provocative title as I expected: “All vendors should drive forward, develop technologies, help us build and maintain data-centers easier.”, after a long conversation we concluded that for the general good of the *customers*, the ones with the dollars in the pocket, cross vendor collaboration brings greater value than “re-implementing” features from each-other. Companies such as Intel, IBM, Cisco, Red Hat working together would bring greater value. The Red Hat/Intel collaboration on KVM technology brought great fruits, and Open Virtualization Alliance is expected to bring even greater benefit to us, technology lovers.

Another collaboration in storage area is the one with NetApp, which produced a great resource for RedHat / NetApp customers, an amazing Best Practices paper for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 with NetApp Storage, written by Jon Benedict (a.k.a Captain KVM), Technical Marketing Engineer at NetApp.

Some chapters overlap with Red Hat documentation, I think most interesting chapters are the ones discussing special customization and aspects that must be considered when implementing RHEV 3.0 with NetApp Storage: storage DeDuplication, Disk Alignment, Thin / Thick Provisioning, Storage Network,Snapshots, VLANs, backups and Disaster Recovery.

Jon have also written RHEV 3.0 with NetApp storage deployment guild, a technical “How-To” describing the steps in building and integrating the two. Much is coverd on various online resources (even I wrote one a while a go NetApp as NFS Storage for RHEV), This one is a whole complete step by step how-to on integrating NetApp Storage with RHEV 3.0

Download Best Practices paper for RHEV 3.0 with NetApp Storage  written by Jon Benedict, NetApp

Jon also mentioned some of those aspects during a session he gave at Red Hat Summit last year, I found the Q&As at the end particularly interesting.

Download (MP4 format) Jon Benedict talks about NetApp storage and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3 at Red Hat Summit 2011