VI Team Blog

What is the new news?

In VMware Infrastructure version 3.5 we introduced Storage VMotion, which does a live migration of virtual machine disk files from one storage location to another without any disruption or downtime to virtual machines and applications. Although Storage VMotion is designed to work with any type of storage, it was initially supported only with Fibre Channel SANs. As of Update 1, Storage VMotion is supported with iSCSI SAN’s for moving virtual machine disk files in the following scenarios:

- From iSCSI SANs to other iSCSI SANs

- From iSCSI SANs to FibreChannel SANs

- From FibreChannel SANs to iSCSI SANs
 
In addition, we now support the use of 10Gb Ethernet for iSCSI in a VMware Infrastructure environment.

What does this mean for users?

It means that you have the ability to optimize and update your storage environment whenever you need, without downtime to your applications. You can make sure that your virtual machines are always on the storage that meets your needs—regardless of how you first deploy your virtual machines, you can change the configuration of your storage and the type of storage (whether FibreChannel or iSCSI) as you need without disrupting your running virtual machines and applications. With Storage VMotion you can do any of the following without downtime:

• Move virtual machines to a new array when you upgrade or refresh an array
• Move virtual machine disks to a different tier of storage as their needs change
• Troubleshoot and solve performance problems caused by storage misconfiguration or too      much load on a particular LUN 

Adding support for 10GB Ethernet for iSCSI means that you can continue to ensure that your iSCSI SAN deployment meets your performance requirements even as your virtual environment continues to scale up and your demands for storage networking bandwidth continue to grow.