At VMworld this week VMware announced a new initiative called vStorage.  There isn’t a lot of detailed information about vStorage that I’ve been able to find but from what I’ve heard vStorage will significantly impact the virtualization landscape.

vStorage understands the services that exist in the storage layer and will utilize those services when they make sense.  For example, if a user wants to move a large VMDK from one storage pool to another then vStorage will kick off the migration using storage array migration services instead of having the server actually perform the migration.  This is significantly improve the performance of the system by cutting migration times by an order of magnitude.

This reminds me of all the buzz around "Serverless Backup" that the SAN switch guys use to talk about in the late 90’s.  Anytime you can get services enabled that are actually closer to the data the better. 

My understanding is that vStorage is 6-18 months out.  I’ll be keeping any eye on this and keep you updated as more information rolls out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Virtual infrastructure management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.