Authored by Sean Kinney, Senior Director, Dell EMC Midrange Storage Marketing
A Key VMware Virtual Volume benefit for both your vSphere and Storage Administrators
IT Director – tell me if this story sounds familiar. You identify database application performance challenges. Your VMware admin tells you “Our VMs are having performance issues” and your storage admin replies “LUN and storage pool performance looks fine”. Both can be right, yet neither understands what the other is saying.
Beyond all of the great management capabilities that VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) provides, using vVols also allows server and storage admins to communicate with a common terminology, increasing overall productivity and helping them resolve application issues as quickly as possible. Dell EMC and VMware participated together in the design of Virtual Volumes with the clear goal to develop a new storage operational model centered on the Virtual Machine.
Midsize organizations that leverage the Dell EMC Midrange Storage portfolio have the same functional needs as our largest customers but are often staffed by smaller teams that need to support multiple technologies. Virtual Volumes brings a VM context and “virtual machine awareness” to storage, abstracting underlying storage infrastructure to allow vSphere admins to self-manage their own storage needs. IT infrastructure challenges are managed without the need to become a generalist or hire a specialist in yet another technology.
For both the vSphere admin and the storage admin, Virtual Volumes separate the presentation of storage for VMs from its consumption, simplifying operations and management. In the VMware SDS model with Virtual Volumes, the storage admin creates the Virtual Volumes capable datastore, defining the storage capacity and the vSphere admin then creates profiles based on a menu of appropriate data services. Once this initial step is complete, the vSphere admin becomes self-sufficient, using the capabilities available in the datastore to apply Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) policies on a per-VM basis. Service level changes are accomplished quickly and easily by simply changing policies.
The value of VMware vVols is recognized by our customers. On Dell EMC Unity we have seen a 3x increase in vVols deployments between July 2017 and July 2018. If you too want to become even more productive when managing your virtualized environment, give VMware vVols a serious look. To learn more please reference the Dell EMC Unity Virtualization white paper.
