VASA, SDRS, VAAI are all leading us to vVols in a step-wise fashion.Everything that has “VM awareness” right now (think EMC Unisphere in VNX – particular on NFS where you can do VM-level operations or Tintri as examples) all are “managing around” the datastore. There aren’t LUN-based datastores or NFS-based datastores. Putting aside what they are – what they mean (or at least are intended to mean) is that there’s no more scaling datastores with VMs, and also no “placement” of VMs. Protocol Endpoints are how you get block or file IO into and out of the storage device. Protocol Endpoints are “IO Demultiplexers” – they can be block or NAS, but they aren’t a datastore BTW – in the current demos, the concept of “storage pools” (which are “bound” to a Protocol Endpoint) follow the “datastore workflows” – this is intended to make vVols very easy to integrate into current operational paradigms and processes – but they are NOT at datastore.vVols is an idea which makes the 'VM” the unit of storage mangement and policy – not the datastore – this is big.… and now that it’s VMworld 2012 Barcelona – bring on the vVol awesomesauce :-)įirst some – important ideas at the core of what vVols are all about: So… between the VMworlds, we’ve been feverishly working with the drop and updating the EMC prototypes… We worked together (thank you VMware!) and got some stuff done in time for San Francisco – but the BIG engineering drop came shortly afterwards. You can draw your own conclusions based on the stuff we’re showing.Īt VMworld 2012 in San Francisco – I talked about this more, and did a post, which I would encourage you to see here.Ī little behind the scenes… in the run-up to VMworld 2012 in SF, there still weren’t key drops from VMware to the technology partners, and also it wasn’t clear how much we could talk about (and how much VMware was going to talk about it). To be very clear – this is still a technology preview – no dates, period. This is something that has been in the works since before this same time last year – but is getting closer to real. At VMworld 2012, covers started to come off the idea of Virtual Volumes or “vVols”.

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