Once more I’m pleased to offer a guest post from another highly valued partner of ours in the VVol space, and another design partner for Virtual Volumes: IBM.
Today’s post talks about some of the history of how IBM came to realize the promise of VVol, what problems we are all trying to fix, and how IBM helps deliver on the “beauty and benefits” of VVol based storage. Continue reading
David Glynn
August 24, 2015
It is my pleasure today to again offer a post that has been written by an esteemed industry colleague and guest blogger. This post on VVol was written by Hitachi Data System’s Dinesh Singh. Dinesh is Solutions Marketing Manager with Hitachi Data Systems focused on virtualization and cloud solutions. Dinesh drives awareness and adoption of HDS storage solutions for VMware Server and EUC virtualization platforms. In this post Dinesh tells us about how Hitachi has approached the implementation of Virtual Volumes on their platform, and gives us some very nice detail about what can be done with HDS gear when coupled with Vvol.
I saw a question the other day that asked “Can someone explain what the big deal is about Virtual Volumes?” A fair question.
The shortest, easiest answer is that VVols offer per-VM management of storage that helps deliver a software defined datacenter.
That, however, is a pretty big statement that requires some unpacking. Rawlinson has done a great job of showcasing Virtual Volumes already, and has talked about how it simplifies storage management, puts the VMs in charge of their own storage, and gives us more fine-grained control over VM storage. I myself will also dive into some detail on the technical capabilities in the future, but first let’s take a broader look at why this really is an important shift in the way we do VM storage.
I’ve been fortunate to have one of our super sharp product line managers, Alex Jauch (twitter @ajauch), spend some time explaining to me one of the new enabling technologies of vSphere 6.0: VAIO. Let’s take a look at this really powerful capability and see what types of things it can enable and an overview of how it works.
This had for a time colloquially been known as “IO Filters”. Fundamentally, it is a means by which a VM can have its IO safely and securely filtered in accordance with a policy.
VAIO offers partners the ability to put their technology directly into the IO stream of a VM through a filter that intercepts data before it is committed to disk.
Well that’s up to our customers and our partners. VAIO is a filtering framework that will initially allow vendors to present capabilities for caching and replication to individual VMs. This will expand over time as partners come on board to write filters for the framework, so you can imagine where this can go for topics such as security, antivirus, encryption and other areas, as the framework matures. VAIO gives us the ability to do stuff to an IO stream in a safe and certified fashion, and manage the whole thing through profiles to ensure we get a view into the IO stream’s compliance with policy!
The VAIO program itself is for partners – the benefit is for consumers who want to do policy based management of their environment and pull in the value of our partner solutions directly into per-VM and indeed per-virtual disk storage management.
When partners create their solutions their data services are surfaced through the Storage Policy Based Management control plane, just like all the rest of our policy-driven storage offerings like Virtual SAN or Virtual Volumes.
Beyond that, because the data services operate at the VM virtual device level, they can also work with just about any type of storage device, again furthering the value of VSAN and VVOLs, and extending the use of these offerings through these additional data services.
The capabilities of a partner filter solution are registered with the VAIO framework, and are surfaced for user interaction in the SPBM Continue reading
VMware’s 2015 Partner Exchange is now just about one week away, and it’s shaping up to be a great one!
In storage and availability we’ll have a lot to talk about across the board: Some sessions will offer deeper examinations of our current products, others will give you a great exploration of some of the newer things VMware has to showcase.
I’ve made a list of some of the sessions put on by those of us in the storage and availability product team; it’s a good cross section from product marketing, product managers, and technical marketing people such as myself. Outside of the engineers who actually write the code, these are the people closest to the products you use, so sign up and hear something new. There are also sessions from our highly experienced field sales and technical teams — the experts at understanding how these products address customer requirements and explaining their value to our customers.
I’m personally doing a technical session with my colleague Rawlinson on Virtual SAN (STO4275) and looking forward to it quite a bit.
Lastly, don’t be shy to come say hello after the sessions. We love to hear your thoughts, if we’ve got time between activities…