RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional...

21
RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES Alexey Polkovnikov (EMCCAe, EMCDSA, EMCISA) Senior System Architect ACCESS Europe GmbH

Transcript of RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional...

Page 1: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES

Alexey Polkovnikov(EMCCAe, EMCDSA, EMCISA)Senior System ArchitectACCESS Europe GmbH

Page 2: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2

Table of Contents

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 4

Traditional storage systems: File Systems, LUNs ............................................................................ 4

Virtualized infrastructure storage challenge ..................................................................................... 4

Storage response to the virtualized infrastructure ............................................................................ 5

VVols overview: core idea, history, current state .............................................................................. 5

VVol concept history ..................................................................................................................... 6

Core Concepts ............................................................................................................................. 7

How granularity is making a difference ............................................................................................ 9

Snapshots .................................................................................................................................... 9

Clones ........................................................................................................................................ 10

Deduplication ............................................................................................................................. 11

Replication ................................................................................................................................. 12

VVols mechanics basics ................................................................................................................ 13

Out-of-band VVols management ................................................................................................ 13

Interacting parties ....................................................................................................................... 14

Binding a Virtual Volume to a Protocol Endpoint ........................................................................ 14

Creating a Virtual Volume........................................................................................................... 15

Storage Policy-Based Management ............................................................................................... 15

Software-Defined Storage with VVols ............................................................................................ 18

Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 18

Appendix A .................................................................................................................................... 20

Page 3: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 3

Table of Figures

Figure 1 - vSphere Storage APIs structure ....................................................................................... 6

Figure 2 - VVol concept history ........................................................................................................ 7

Figure 3 - Protocol Endpoint's role ................................................................................................... 8

Figure 4 - Storage Container's role .................................................................................................. 9

Figure 5 - VVol-level snapshots ..................................................................................................... 10

Figure 6 - VVol-level cloning .......................................................................................................... 11

Figure 7- VVol-level deduplication .................................................................................................. 12

Figure 8 - VVol-level replication ..................................................................................................... 13

Figure 9 - Basic VVol interaction parties ........................................................................................ 14

Figure 10 - Service-oriented provisioning with SPBM..................................................................... 16

Figure 11 - SPBM connects requirements with resources .............................................................. 17

Disclaimer: The views, processes, or methodologies published in this article are those of the

author. They do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes, or methodologies.

Page 4: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 4

Introduction

This article presents the cutting-edge concept of “VM-granular Storage”. I will keep things simple

and not go into much technical detail in order to maintain focus on the underlying meaning of this

modern storage paradigm that will likely dominate the IT industry in the near future. Use cases are

provided to demonstrate the infrastructure benefits from this new storage paradigm.

Traditional storage systems: File Systems, LUNs

Traditional storage systems mainly use LUNs and File Systems as provisioning and management

units. We talk about LUNs for the block-wise access, FS for the file-level, and both when it comes

to the unified storage. Taken further, for iSCSI, FC, and NFS (CIFS), the level of granularity is

LUNs and files.

Virtualized infrastructure storage challenge

Infrastructure has changed dramatically, becoming increasingly virtualized. Today, virtual server is

a default deployment option (over physical server) for many enterprise deployment policies.

Different industry reports and estimations indicate that virtual server deployments have surpassed

physical server deployments during the last 4-5 years.

So what? Infrastructure virtualization is not a secret (and storage virtualization also is not). The

point is that traditional storage arrays that are very effective when working with physical servers are

less so when the servers are virtualized.

In a traditional (physical) infrastructure, storage arrays are smart enough to understand single host

I/O pattern when a LUN is dedicated to a single host or when it is shared and there is a possibility

to track the hosts with some identifier (i.e. World Wide Name).

Caching techniques that help the array improve its external performance can be effectively used in

this case to pre-fetch the data from the internal drives. Note: FLASH-based drives are still too

expensive to hold a significant part of an array’s capacity, so there are still a lot of mechanical hard

drives inside.

These performance improvements fall short when it comes to the virtualized hosts, due to the fact

that I/O from the different VMs is coming the same way and storage is unaware of this (this effect is

also known as “I/O blender”).

Page 5: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 5

Data protection/copying/movement features are also greatly impacted by the fact that the same

LUNs are used by numerous virtualized hosts. LUN level locking is a significant issue in such

cases.

Storage response to the virtualized infrastructure

Of course, the limitations and drawbacks of traditional storage in virtualized infrastructures have

been already addressed by storage/virtualization vendors. There is a trend in the storage industry

called “VM-aware storage”. VM-aware storage is all about making it possible for the storage and

hypervisor to talk to each other. This helps the storage to be more effective in VM workloads,

handling and hypervisors to offload the operations to the storage level and avoiding unnecessary

hypervisor-level data movement and inefficient “software” operations.

VM-aware storage is a good practical step forward in terms of the storage/virtualization integration.

However, it still doesn’t address the fundamental need of having the same language between the

virtualization side and storage side.

Here the emerging concept of the VM granular storage comes into play. This is a rethinking of the

storage arrays which takes into account the virtualized infrastructure seriously and makes VMs first-

class citizens for the storage systems.

VVols overview: core idea, history, current state

As VMware is currently a strong virtualization leader (according to Gartner’s 2013 market research;

see Appendix A for more details), in this article I will describe VMware’s approach to the VM-

granular storage – VVols (Virtual Volumes, VM Volumes). Currently VVols exists in the format of

“pre-technology”, meaning only technology previews have been released at the time this article was

written and there are no expressed commitments from the vendor. However, very likely, this is the

future of the storage for the virtualized world.

The core idea of VVols is to make the storage serve for the virtualization infrastructures at the level

of the virtualization’s native concepts like Virtual Disk (VMDK) instead of traditional storage

management concepts or effective-yet-workaround ways like VMFS datastores.

This changes the existing storage paradigm of using standard LUNs and File Systems as universal

underlying units; Virtual Volumes would be generally based on the resource pools, not on the LUNs

and File Systems. This should align the storage side management with the reality on the virtualized

host side.

Page 6: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 6

VVol concept history

VVols technology is not something that is easy to deliver in a single piece; it was presented by

VMware and its storage partners in the format of technology preview/updates on VMworld 2011,

2012, and 2013 (see Appendix A for more details).

Successful implementation of such a holistic and deep concept requires a staging approach as well

as support from the storage vendors’ part of the equation.

Currently, communication between VMware vSphere and storage is achieved through a set of

interfaces, called VMware vSphere Storage APIs shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: vSphere Storage APIs structure

I will touch on two of the VMware vSphere Storage APIs that are related to the topic: array

integration API and storage awareness API.

vSphere API for Array Integration (VAAI) was introduced by VMware several years ago. VAAI’s

purpose was to offload some of the operations from ESX hypervisor servers to the storage arrays

(if the array vendor supports this feature through a vendor plug-in for VMware vSphere). This

greatly improved performance of the operations that were hardware-offloaded like cloning, copying,

and zeroing. If the offloading process is supported by the storage, VMware vSphere VMkernel Data

Mover avoids its “software data movement” and uses “hardware data movement” when the API can

be effectively used for tasks like inside-storage inter-datastore VMDK copying.

After that, VMware vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) appeared. VASA was targeted to

give the virtual environment insights into the storage system. What kind of insights? The

information to enable vSphere-based monitoring, trouble-shooting, provisioning. This was a step

forward in making the virtual infrastructure more storage-aware and it continued to move the focus

to the VM-based concepts. However, these interfaces were reporting-only; no “active storage

management” was possible.

vSphere Storage APIs

Storage Awareness

Array Integration

Multi-pathing

Data Protection

Page 7: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7

Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept called “Virtual Volumes”. VASA will

be extended in a way that introduces powerful basic abstractions: Storage Containers, Virtual

Volumes (VVols), Protocol Endpoints. Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) will be

introduced to enable creation of policies on the virtualization side (vSphere) that will be mapped to

the Storage Capability Profiles exposed by the storage and to manage the storage based on these

policies. When will the VVols technology be released? There are no commitments from VMware or

its storage partners. However, according to the update from VMworld 2013, expected technology

release is to be delivered in 2014-2015.

Figure 2: VVol concept history

Core Concepts

VVols architecture defines the model that consists of the following main concepts:

1. Storage Containers – Containing entities that host the Virtual Volumes (VVols can be

created only inside such containers). Storage Containers are managed by the storage

administrator.

2. Virtual Volumes (VVols) – Virtual disks that reside inside the Storage Containers and

controlled by the virtualization side. Virtualization administrator creates them using vSphere

Client; ESXi hosts are directing I/O to them through the Protocol Endpoints on behalf of the

virtual machines running on those hypervisors.

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014/15

vSphere 4.1: VAAI

vSphere 5.0 : VASA 1.0 VAAI update

vSphere 5.5: VAAI update vSphere 5.1

vSphere 2015: VASA 2.0 - VVols

Virtualization side - VMware

Storage side - Market leaders

VASA /VAAI support: EMC, IBM

VASA/VAAI support: NetApp, Dell, HP

VASA 2.0/VVols support: EMC, IBM, NetApp, Dell, HP

Page 8: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 8

3. Protocol Endpoints (EP) – Protocol-dependant connection points that VVols I/O go through.

This is a powerful I/O-demultiplexing concept that enables numerous VVols that reside on a

single array be accessed by the ESX hosts through the on-demand data path. For the

virtualization side, PE will be either a LUN (for iSCSI) or a mount point (for NFS).

Storage Containers and Protocol Endpoints are orthogonal concepts in this model. Storage

Containers’ role assumes being a logical grouping entity for the VVols (for example, different

Storage Containers can be used for the different tenants, i.e. departments/BUs of the enterprise,

service provider customers, etc.). PE, on the other hand can be seen as a fault domain. PE is not

supposed to serve for purposes of VVol/host isolation.

Figure 3: Protocol Endpoint's role

Storage Array

VVol VVol

Hypervisor Host

VM VM

Single Protocol Endpoint to demultiplex I/O from different VMs

VVol VVol

Hypervisor Host

VM VM

PE

I/O

Page 9: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 9

Figure 4: Storage Container's role

In terms of numbers, a single storage system could support a few million Virtual Volumes, that

reside in a few thousands of Storage Containers. All of these VVols are accessible with just a pair

of Protocol Endpoints (for example, one for the file and one for the block access).

How granularity is making a difference

Let’s consider some examples of what VM storage granularity and hypervisor/storage integration

means in practice when it comes to data services. Snapshots, cloning, replication, and

deduplication use cases are presented below.

Snapshots

Having separate VVols for the VM disks makes it possible to do snapshots in a smart way:

1. Only the needed VMs’ disks are copied (not the datastore or entire LUN).

2. The operation itself is offloaded to the storage, which makes it far more effective than

performing ESX-server-involving “software” snapshots.

3. Retention policies and schedules are managed on a per-VM basis.

Storage Array

Storage Container

VVol VVol

Hypervisor Host

VM VM

Storage Container logically groups volumes. Grouping can be related to tenants.

VM VM

Storage Container

VVol VVol

Association only, I/O goes through the PEs

Page 10: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 10

Figure 5: VVol-level snapshots

VM configuration data and swap that are also stored on separate VVols (not shown here, for

simplicity) are not snapped so no unnecessary data gets into the snapshot.

Clones

Pretty much like snapshots, VM disk cloning benefits from having separate manageable VVols that

correspond to the disks. When it is needed to clone a VM and its disks, the operation is hardware-

offloaded (and optimized on the storage side) and yet only the cloned VM-related disks are copied.

Storage Array

VVol VVol

Hypervisor Host (ESXi)

VM

Snapshot

VM

Separate VM disk, individual schedule and retention policy.

Hardware offloaded

Association only, I/O goes through the PEs

snap

Page 11: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 11

Figure 6: VVol-level cloning

VM configuration data and swap that are also stored on separate VVols (not shown here, for

simplicity) are not cloned, so no unnecessary data gets cloned.

Deduplication

Virtual volumes for the different VMs have different space efficiency and performance

requirements. With VVols, it is possible to dedupe (or not) each volume separately.

Storage Array

VVol VVol

Hypervisor Host (ESXi)

VM VM

Separate VM disk is cloned for the separate VM

Hardware offloaded

VVol

VM

Association only, I/O goes through the PEs clone

clone

Page 12: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 12

Figure 7: VVol-level deduplication

Replication

Replication also benefits from the level of granularity. There is no need to replicate everything

within a LUN and to copy things like swap files.

Storage Array

VVol VVol

Hypervisor Host (ESXi)

VM VM

Deduped VM disk, its own deduplication domain

Association only, I/O goes through the PEs

No dedupe, no performance penalty

Page 13: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 13

Figure 8: VVol-level replication

VM swap that is stored on a separate VVol (not shown here, for simplicity) is not snapped, so no

unnecessary data gets replicated.

VVols mechanics basics

In order to better understand the idea of VVols in action, let’s look at some VVols mechanics

basics.

Out-of-band VVols management

As opposed to in-band management—going through the data path (the path where I/O goes)—all

VVols-related management operations, including binding, are going out-of-band through the VASA

interface that is exposed to the vCenter Server and ESXi servers.

VASA interface is implemented by the VASA Provider, a part of the storage firmware that is

responsible for ensuring VVols-related functionality from the storage side. The VASA Vendor

Provider is exposed as a web-service for the virtualization-side storage-awareness requests.

Storage Array Storage Array

VVol VVol

Hypervisor Host (ESXi)

VM VM

Only a VM disk that requires replication

Hardware offloaded

Association only, I/O goes through the PEs

replicate VVol

Page 14: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 14

Interacting parties

Let’s take a closer look at identifying basic interacting parties in VVol technology.

Figure 9: Basic VVol interaction parties

VASA Provider is the management interface (or control path entry point) for the virtualization side. It

communicates to the ESXi Hosts and vCenter Servers to enable “active storage management” from

the virtualization side.

The data path (where I/O flows) goes between ESXi Host and the storage. In order to address a

specific VVol, it is demultiplexed by the Protocol Endpoints that are assigned on VVol binding.

VVols can be accessed through block and file PEs using SCSI or NFS.

Binding a Virtual Volume to a Protocol Endpoint

How are the Protocol Endpoints bound to the Virtual Volumes? ESXi or vCenter Server are

requesting a storage system (VASA Provider, being more specific) to perform binding for the Virtual

Storage Array

VVol

PE

ESXi Host

VM VM VM

VASA

Provider

vCenter Server

I/O Control

Page 15: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 15

Volume with Bind request. Storage system replies with an identifier of the Protocol Endpoint that

will be used for the I/O to this Virtual Volume. It is up to the storage system what PE to return.

Creating a Virtual Volume

Virtual Volumes are created by the ESXi hosts or vCenter Server using VASA API. The operation is

out-of-band. Creating a new VVol requires selecting an existing Storage Container where the VVol

will reside. This part of the process (selection) is actually one of the most promising parts of the

VVols story. Storage provisioning, the VVols way, is based on the two concepts we touched on

before: Storage Capability Profile and Policy Profile. These two concepts are the enablers of

Storage Policy-Based Management.

Storage Policy-Based Management

The goal of Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) is to change the historical way storage

provisioning works: storage admin and virtualization admin first discuss the application requirement.

Then, the storage admin creates storage pools, sets them up, and exposes the LUNs to the

hypervisor host. After that, the VMs are using the storage resources allocated.

SPBM-style storage resources provisioning is much more “service-oriented”:

1. “Storage Service Providers” publish the offerings in the “Storage Service Catalog”. Service

Level Agreements (SLAs) for the different types of the “Storage Services” are clearly stated

and should be guaranteed by the “Storage Service Provider”.

2. “Storage Consumer” states its requirements to the “Storage Service” using Service Level

Objective (SLO).

3. There is an automated mechanism that makes mappings between the consumer

requirements and the provider offerings.

Storage Capability Profile and Policy Profile are used to formulate those offerings and requirements

statements mentioned above. The profile definitions are:

Storage Capability Profiles – Definitions that are used in order to publish a set of specific

Storage Container capabilities, including primary storage aspects, like technology, storage

efficiency, and recovery (those are the quantified elements of the SLA like: "availability" = 7,

"replication" = true, “thin” = false, "maxRPO" = 15 minutes, etc.) These profiles are coming

from the storage side.

Policy Profiles – Collections of policies that define the target ranges of capability values that

comprise SLO (those are quantified, as well). Policy profiles are the VM/application-side

means for the storage provisioning requirements statements.

Page 16: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 16

Instances of these two profile types are matched to each other to map the VM/application

requirements to the available storage resources.

So who does what? The Storage admin creates the Storage Containers that advertize one or more

capability profiles that describe the capabilities of the storage resources the containers are based

on (i.e. storage pools). The VM admin assigns policies to the VMs to get the available storage

resources provisioned optimally for each VM.

Figure 10: Service-oriented provisioning with SPBM

Storage Consumer Side

Storage Service Side

Storage Container

Profile Profile

Storage Container

Profile Profile

VM VM VM

I have this

Policy Policy Policy

Storage Admin

Virtualization Admin

I need this

Page 17: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 17

Figure 11: SPBM connects requirements with resources

ESXi Host

VM VM VM

vSphere

Storage Array

Pool Pool Pool Pool

Storage Container Storage Container

Profile Profile Profile

Policy Policy Policy

VM

SPBM

Page 18: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 18

SPBM is a part of a broader strategy, Policy-Based Management that makes it possible to manage

different types of resources including compute, network, and storage in order to make provisioning

decisions and dynamically reallocate resources. SPBM and Virtual Volumes are also enabling

VMware’s approach to Software-Defined Storage.

Software-Defined Storage with VVols

Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is another big trend of the storage industry. As with other

Software-Defined approaches (Software-Defined Networking, Software-Defined Datacenter, etc.)

the main idea of SDS is to make the hardware as standard, compliant, and commoditized as

possible, while controlling/provisioning the resources from the software control plate.

The software control plate in this case is overarching different pools that are built of the resources

with the same SLA. Each hardware unit still owns the operations that are hardware-offloaded: those

that require performance and optimal implementation that is aware of the hardware internals.

Virtual Volumes and PBM are making it possible to implement such a control plane that is situated

off-the-box (meaning a storage array by the box). Service-oriented SPBM-based storage

management/provisioning is a great way to unify heterogeneous storage systems capabilities and

selecting those storage resources (no matter which storage system owns them) that are optimally

fit the application requirements.

The other part of the SDS story is automation. Storage automation is one of the pillars of modern

virtualized and cloud infrastructures. Since provisioning the virtual machine is basically provisioning

the storage, this operation should be automated. Policy-Based Management and Virtual Volumes is

a great approach to control plane automation that allows not only using capabilities and policies to

perform the placement decisions, but to support alarming and reallocation if the advertized SLA’s

are not being met.

Please use the links in Appendix A to get more information on VMware’s strategy for SDS.

Summary

Virtualized infrastructures are becoming standard in the world of modern IT. The storage part of the

infrastructure should handle the virtualized hosts’ needs “natively” in order to effectively perform in

the new reality. Virtual Volumes technology is an emerging response to the deep underlying need

of alignment between the storage and the rest of the infrastructure.

Page 19: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 19

There is a significant chance that we’ll see VVols all around the storage systems from all major

vendors. There is also a great chance this technology, supported by the storage industry, will

become a keystone of the Software-Defined Storage approach implementation.

Page 20: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 20

Appendix A

1. Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure:

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1GJA88J&ct=130628

2. eWeek - Enterprises Thinking Virtualization First, IDC Says: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-

Infrastructure/Enterprises-Thinking-Virtualization-First-IDC-Says-896006/

3. IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker:

http://www.idc.com/tracker/showproductinfo.jsp?prod_id=39

4. 451 Research's TheInfoPro service reports that average x86 server virtualization levels

have reached 51%: http://www.serverwatch.com/server-trends/survey-51-of-x86-servers-

now-virtualized.html

5. The I/O Blender - PureStorage Blog: http://www.purestorage.com/blog/the-io-blende/

6. VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) Whitepaper:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10337

7. VMworld 2013 - VM-aware Storage for the Software Defined Datacenter:

http://www.vmworld.com/docs/DOC-8671

8. VMworld 2013: VVol update with EMC VNX:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnjf230LYTA

9. vSphere VVol and EMC VMAX Tech Preview - VMworld 2012:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yngHLnanq3s

10. vSphere VVol and EMC VPLEX Tech Preview - VMworld 2012:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx4f9pe4jpA

11. VMware vSphere Blog - Virtual Volumes (VVols) Tech Preview:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/10/virtual-volumes-vvols-tech-preview-with-

video.html

12. VMworld 2011: VSP3205 - VMware vStorage APIs for VM and Application Granular Data

Management: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elttTnltgLI

13. VMware Storage Futures by Cormac Hogan (VMUG):

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2013/05/vmware-storage-futures-video-courtesy-of-vmug-

italia.html

14. Tintri's Brandon Salmon demonstrates how Tintri VMstore supports VMware VVols:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPEw59JKLu4

15. EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbssOJyyvHuW1TAxMzVd8PF4aQPZk5Mb6

16. VMware Office of the CTO - VMware’s Strategy for Software-Defined Storage:

http://cto.vmware.com/vmwares-strategy-for-software-defined-storage/

Page 21: RETHINKING STORAGE FOR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURES · 2020-03-30 · 2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 7 Finally, VASA 2.0 will introduce full support for the new concept

2014 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 21

17. Chuck's Blog (Chuck Hollis, Chief Strategist, VMware SAS BU) - The VMware View Of

Software Defined Storage: http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2013/08/the-vmware-

view-of-software-defined-storage.html

18. VMware vSphere Blog, What is Software Defined Storage? A VMware TMM Perspective -

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/11/what-is-software-defined-storage-a-vmware-

tmm-perspective.html

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The

information is subject to change without notice.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED “AS IS.” EMC CORPORATION

MAKES NO RESPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE

INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED

WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an

applicable software license.