What Is Storage Provisioning In Virtualization Concepts

The cost of managing data center storage can rise quickly once you consider the expense of buying new devices, alongside operating costs like energy expenses, also as staff to watch data capacity and maintain the hardware. Therefore, using and allocating storage during a data center must be wiped out in the foremost efficient way possible without affecting reliability, ensuring data is delivered to the customer. This section will specialize in how data storage capacity is managed to urge the foremost storage possible out of a tool.

Provisioning is the process of strategically assigning space for storing to servers that support the capacity of the storage device(s), availability, and performance requirements. Storage provisioning is often performed in two ways, traditional (thick provisioning) and virtual (thin provisioning).

Note. Provisioning is going to be covered in a later module which deals with virtual memory.

In order for a disk to be provisioned, the storage volumes are partitioned to make logical disks. Simply put, a logical disk may be a virtualized disk. The capacity of a logical disk physically exists during a device somewhere, but the logical disk itself doesn't physically exist. Provisioning requires that disc space is becoming logical instead of physical units because physical disc space can't be shifted around strategically as quickly as logical space are often. Remember, logical disks are data representations of physical disks, not physical hardware.

⁠⁠​​ In traditional provisioning, also called thick provisioning, disc space is strategically pre-allocated to a server or a virtual machine. This suggests that the logical space provided by partitioning is adequate to the quantity of actual physical space put aside on the disk.

For example, once you found out an OS like Windows, a particular amount of space for storing is provisioned surely files and programs. With this method, you initially estimate what proportion of storage the program will need for its entire life cycle. You then provision a hard and fast amount of space for storing to the disk beforehand, for instance, within the image below, a 128GB disk drive has been provisioned to permit 28GB for the C drive and 80GB for the E drive, leaving 20GB of free space. Both the C and E drives are thick provisioned. this is often demonstrated by the space for storing provided beforehand in anticipation that every drive will need that quantity to satisfy future storage needs.