VMworld 2014: How vVols provides storage x-ray vision

Session STO2554-SPO

This was a short 30 minute session on a high level overview of VMware vVols, and then a presentation by HP about their 3PAR integration.

Today’s Challenges: Today: fixed sized LUNs, lack of granular control, complex provision cycles, LUN centric storage configuration, wasted resources, frequent data migrations

Hypervisor opens up new opportunities: Sits directly in the data path, hardware agnostic, and global view of underlying infrastructure

Everything is driven by a policy control engine with vVols.

vVols introduces a new component: the VASA provider, which lives in the storage array. No more LUNs, no more filesystems. Vasa provider is accessed outside of the data path. Arrays are logically partitioned into containers called storage containers.

VM disks, called virtual volumes, are created natively on the storage containers

Advertised data services are offloaded to the array (such as snapshot, replication, dedupe, QoS, encryption, etc.)

HP Implementation of vVols

3PAR was selected as the VMware fibre channel reference platform for all vVol testing

Will support vVols day 1, with vSphere 6.0

VM-Granularity of: Storage QoS, subtiering, extended caching, high availability with peer persistence, dedupe, thin clones

Shows a CLI that displays vm-level information such as data usage for each “file”