Hifn announced the first customer installation of a new performance-optimized configuration of its Swarm iSCSI storage appliance with VMware ESX Server, combining the benefits of a virtualized IT infrastructure with the cost advantages of iSCSI storage networking and QLogic’s high-performance iSCSI HBA.

Hifn’s latest Swarm VMware Edition is optimized for ESX Server configurations. The latest VMware Edition was installed on a Swarm Model 3200 appliance with 7.5 terabytes of shared SAN storage utilizing the high-performance QLogic QLA4852 iSCSI HBA. The Hifn-QLogic VMware solution allowed five physical blade servers to share the virtualized storage of a single Swarm appliance. The addition of the QLogic iSCSI HBA allowed for more virtual machines to be added to the cluster with nominal performance degradation.

The customer installation also included VMware’s Vmotion. Hifn’s Swarm appliance was a key enabling technology for the Vmotion functionality by storing and sharing a set of VMware files that encapsulate the entire state of the migrated virtual machine. VMware’s clustered Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) allows multiple installations of ESX Server to access the same virtual machine files concurrently on the shared Swarm storage pool. Live virtual machine migration gives customers the freedom to perform hardware maintenance without scheduled downtime and proactively migrate virtual machines away from failing or under-performing servers, and perform load balancing across all available ESX virtual machines.

“Storage virtualization is a key enabler for iSCSI technology,” said John Matze, Vice President of Business Development at Hifn. “Hifn and QLogic understand the needs of VMware customers and the stress that iSCSI and TCP overhead can put on server processors, particularly in large virtual machine deployments. Our performance-optimized Swarm Edition for VMware once again demonstrates the versatility of the Swarm platform and how it delivers many options and endless solutions for affordable SAN-based storage.”