3PAR, CommVault, Compellent among vendors supporting
VMware last week introduced vSphere 4.1, it latest virtualization platform. vSphere 4.1 has a variety of storage offerings but primarily the vStorage API for Array integration (VAAI), which allows VMware ESX servers to offload several storage operations to the storage hardware.
3PAR, CommVault, Compellent, EMC, Hitachi and NetApp specifically signaled support for vSphere 4.1, but only 3PAR, EMC, Hitachi and NetApp said that they are working on VAAI. It appears that VMware is eking out developer kits to storage vendors as several vendors say the kit is hard to get.
VAAI promises three capabilities: Full Copy Operations, Block Zeroing and Hardware Assisted Locking. In Full Copy, xcopy functions to offload work to the array. Block Zeroing speeds up the zeroing out of blocks or writing repeated content and Hardware Assisted Locking is a means of locking the entire LUN during certain operations such as virtual machine startup. VAAI will improve the performance of Storage vMotion, provisioning virtual machines and thin disk provisioning.
3PAR’s Plug-In for VMware is expected to be available in September. EMC will support VAAI on the CX-4 and Celerra in Q3 of this year and on the VMAX in Q4. Hitachi will support VAAI on its Adaptable Modular Series (AMS) 2000 storage arrays.
VMware also last week introduced Storage I/O Controls (SIOC) as part of its vSphere 4.1 launch. SIOC, which 3PAR says it will support, allows QoS for storage I/O – I/O shares can be enforced across all virtual machines even when I/O is congested.
VSphere also supports boot from SAN technology over iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet and Fibre Channel.
