Session STO7645
*LUNS Suck
Pain Points: Siloed management, rigid infrastructure, complex process, no visibility into storage, capabilities applied at the LUN level, vendor specific configuration required, LUN sprawl.
VVOls offer: storage policy-based management, capabilities applied at the disk level. Consumed on demand.
Storage policy-based model simplifies operations significantly
What are VVols?
- Virtual disks are natively represented on an array
- Enabled VM granular storage operations
- Supports FC, iSCSI, NFS
- Based on T10 industry standards
- Uses a VASA provider for the control path
- No filesystem
- Data services offloaded to array
- 5 types of VVols: Config, Data, Mem, Swap, Other
Data Plane
- Storage container – Storage admins create the container that sets the array capabilities. Can be sized up/down as needed.
- Virtual datastore uses protocol end points to talk to the array
- End points can be iSCSI, NFS v3, FC, FCoE
- Existing multi-pathing policies and NFS topology requirements can be applied to PE (protocol endpoint)
- PEs are provided by the VASA provider to vSphere
Management Plane
- Storage policy-based management – App centric automation
- Intelligent placement
- Automation at scale through policy
- Single VASA provider can manage multiple arrays
- ESX and vCenter server connect to VASA provider
VVols in Operation
- Create VMs
- Assign a VM storage policy
- Choose a suitable datastore
Snapshots
- Snapshots may be read-only or read/write
- Managed snapshot – Created by vSphere
- Unmanaged snapshot – Created and managed by array
- Snapshot creation is offloaded to array
- Snapshots impose no I/O penalty and can very quickly revert with re-playing logs
Future Considerations
- Integrate data services – Replication, encryption, device advancements
- Simplify management – Usability, operate at scale
- VASA Replication model – “Replication group” between “fault domains”
- Sync, failover, test failover, reverse replication
