IBM recently announced their first implementation of vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA). At its most basic, VASA enables vCenter to see underlying storage capabilities. To learn more about VASA, please take a moment to read my previous posts on the subject here and here.
What follows is a brief description of IBM's VASA implementation for XIV arrays.
Q1. Which IBM array models will support VASA in this first release? A1. All models of IBMs XIV will be supported.
Q2. How has IBM done the Vendor Provider Implementation? A2. IBM’s VASA Vendor Provider is a standalone software “application” with a Windows (only) installer that can be installed on either a physical or virtual machine. It communicates with the IBM XIV using XIV CLI commands which are then surfaced to VMware through an Apache Tomcat webserver. It requires no license and is a free download from IBM's Fix Central software download site.
Q3. Which Storage Capabilities will be surfaced by VASA into vCenter? A3. No capabilities are surfaced in Version 1.1.0 (the initial version). Instead the VASA Provider delivers information about storage topology, capabilities, and state which can be displayed in the standard Storage Views menu. In addition the VASA provider will report relevant XIV events and alerts such as Thin Provisioning capacity thresholds being exceeded.
Here is a screen-shot taken from the vSphere client showing the storage view, with the information surfaced via VASA. Information includes whether or not the LUN is Thin Provisioned, the Storage Array identifier and the LUN identifier used on the array:
The VASA provider for XIV can be downloaded from IBM Central. You will need an IBM ID to download it.
While IBM have chosen not to implement the full range of capabilities through VASA, it is nice to see them delivering some of the features.
As I have said in previous posts, this is a 1.0 release of the API. As we add more and more functionality to the API to retrieve additional information, I'm positive that we will see more and more of the array characteristics surfaced in the vCenter UI via VASA, giving vSphere admins more and more insight into the underlying storage used for datastores, and make management much easier.
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