VMTN Blog

Dave Marshall at the InfoWorld Virtualization Report sums up the last two weeks' advances in the state of the art of Storage VMotion:

Link: VMware Community Spices Up VMware Storage VMotion

One of the things I like about being in the IT industry is the sense of community. And as both VMware and virtualization in general continue to expand in popularity, the virtualization community continues to grow around it. Case in point, VMware offered a new feature with its VI 3.5 product, Storage VMotion, and members of the community have already started helping others through the creation of additional 3rd-party utilities that help expand the ease of use of this VMware feature.

VMware describes Storage VMotion as a state-of-the-art solution that enables users to perform live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous storage arrays with complete transaction integrity and no interruption in service for critical applications.

This feature does for virtual machines and storage what VMware VMotion did for virtual machines and compute capacity. However, members of the community may not have been overly excited about the way it was implemented.

To try and answer that calling, there have already been two virtualization community members that have taken matters into their own hands.

He has some screen shots of Alexander Giswinkler's Windows-based GUI and Andrew Kutz's VC plug-in. As Andrew says at his site Lostcreations. As he says there, this is "the FIRST released, third-party plugin in fact" for VC 2.5. In the thread on the community he  says he's working on an explanation of how he reverse-engineered the APIs and protocols:

it is the result of a two-week dive into the inner-workings of the VI client libraries with popular reflection tools (reverse-engineering). l o s t c r e a t i o n s is working on a white paper that describes how to build VI plugins.

These tools aren't supported by VMware, so use at your own risk, but kudos to both Alexander and Andrew.