As most of the followers of this blog will know by now, VMware made some significant announcements around its storage direction at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco last month. One of the announcements related to this new feature called Distributed Storage – basically the ability to take ESXi hosts with just local storage and build a distributed datastore across all hosts in the cluster. There are so many neat features attached to this, such as its scale out capability (just add a new ESXi node to the cluster), the ability to have compute-only nodes in the cluster (ESXi hosts with no local storage) and the introduction of Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) to define virtual machine storage requirements such as performance and availability in the form of a profile. This profile is then pushed down to the Distributed Storage layer when the VMDK is being instantiated, and the VMDK is layed out across the distributed datastore in such a way as to meet these requirements.
There is so much more to Distributed Storage than that of course. For further information, please read the articles on Distrbuted Storage posted by my colleagues Massimo Re’Ferre here, Duncan Epping here and Christos Karamanolis here. The main reason for this post is to show you a video which was used at VMworld 2012 to show some of the neat features of this Distributed Storage announcement. Its pretty short (about 5 minutes) but it gives you an idea as to why we are all so excited about it here at VMware.
For those of you heading to VMworld 2012 in Barcelona in October, INF-STO2192 is a session I highly recommend attending. For those of you who cannot make VMworld, I’d highly recommend watching the recording.
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