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Viva Las VVols?

Editorial Type: Technology focus     Date: 11-2015    Views: 1784      





The launch of VMware's vSphere 6 early in 2015 - complete with support for Virtual Volumes (VVols) - was heralded as a game changer for storage management. Six months down the line, Ibby Rahmani of DataCore Software discusses the true impact of VVols and suggests some short cuts to enablement

Both vSphere and storage administrators crave the simplicity and Virtual Machine (VM)-level of granularity offered by VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols). However today, there are only a handful of storage vendors offering VVols; most current storage arrays and systems do not support them for a variety of reasons, primarily that storage vendors are not incentivised to retrofit legacy equipment with the new VM-aware interface.

Firstly, let's take a quick recap into what VVols are and the interactions that sit behind deployment for storage admins. Simply, VVols enable policy based provisioning and management of virtual machines and storage. First, the storage administrator creates a "storage container" that is assigned for usage by vSphere. This eliminates the need to assign individual volumes every time a vSphere administrator requests it. Then, the vSphere administrator assigns policies based on the characteristics needed to provision a VM. For example, the policies could be gold, silver, bronze - gold being high performance and high availability; silver being medium performance, medium availability, and bronze for low performance, low availability.

After that, VMs can be created in the container as there is available space - using the storage profiles. Finally, vSphere Storage (VASA) API connects the new VM to the storage container. So, in short, when deployed, VVols take away the storage management burden that comes from provisioning VMs. But how can you deploy VVols when only a few are certified to do so?

One simple fix is to deploy a software layer that sits seamlessly above the legacy hardware running in your environment. Of all the software defined storage players, DataCore has emerged as the only vendor that can provide this VVol 'cloaking' and subsequent VVol hardware enablement.

The DataCore SANsymphony-V software layer is currently allowing forward-thinking storage and infrastructure administrators the benefits of VVols across their legacy EMC, IBM, HDS, NetApp and other popular storage systems - including all-flash arrays. Within hyper converged Virtual SAN environments, VVols can also be enjoyed as DataCore pools the direct-attached storage (DAS) with the DataCore Virtual SAN.

Now enabled with VVols, vSphere administrators can 'self-provision' virtual volumes on the fly from virtual storage pools without having to contact the storage administrator. They specify the capacity and class of service without having to know anything about the storage array that sits seamlessly beneath. This has some major advantages:

No more manual recording of Virtual Machines (VMs) to LUN Mapping on spreadsheets: Traditionally, vSphere admins do not have access to the storage and instead request assistance allocating new VMs and storage from the storage administrator. Without VVols, this provisioning leads to an increasingly complicated process that requires multiple slow and convoluted steps. Likewise, without VVols, upon receiving requests to provision further VMs, storage administrators took action against the entire data store with no visibility of the VMs residing on it. As a result, they either manually recorded the VM to LUN mapping on an external spreadsheet or created one data store per VM; a recipe for storage management complexity and a cluttered, top-heavy virtual infrastructure that was too cumbersome, costly and inflexible.

VM & Volume Provisioning is Unified: Today with Virtual Volumes enabled, the vSphere administrator takes greater responsibility for provisioning storage and becomes responsible for defining the various storage policies for VMs. Storage Administrators no longer have the arduous task of recording storage to VM mapping. Pre-determined policy-driven automation enables more agile storage consumption for VMs, which ultimately delivers faster provisioning for new applications and any associated data services. Now, storage administrators can create a snapshot of a specific VM. This also holds true for remote replication, CDP, and other virtual disk-specific functions.

Free trial downloads are available of the VVol enabled software layer at the website below.
More info: www.datacore.com

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