Hopefully, VMware's three pillars (vCloud, vClient, and VDC-OS) are a little more solid (not to mention closer) than the Three Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula

VMware packed a lot into their 2008 VMworld conference, including an outline of their “three pillars” strategy, focused on vClient, vCloud, and something they are calling the Virtual Datacenter Operating System. While it is debatable if this last item really is an operating system, it’s certainly a major strategic change in messaging.

VDC-OS is divided into four “vServices” (Management, Cloud, Application, and Infrastructure), and one core Infrastructure vService is vStorage. Since my focus is enterprise storage, I thought I would take a moment to examine the current and future status of vStorage.

EMC’s Chad Sakac has taken up the challenge of communicating vStorage to the world, in a post to his blog, a pair of YouTube videos (multipathing, I/O dedupe), and (apparently) a session or two at VMworld. But I’m not sure it’s really entirely clear just what vStorage is and what this means to existing and future VMware storage developments. So let’s dive in and take a look.

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VMware just released Update 2 for VMware ESX Server 3.5 (Virtual Infrastructure), and it includes some storage fixes of note:

1. Support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for filesystems Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 guests.  This means VMware services like VCB and SRM can now signal Windows Server to quiesce filesystems before creating a clone or snapshot and is a major addition!
2. Windows Server 2003 guests also get application quiescing, where supported.
3. You can now extend a live, running VMFS volume as storage is added, just like Windows Vista and 2008 guests could already do with raw device mode (RDM).  Note that this only works for flat disks with no persistent snapshots open.

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Symantec announced availability of the latest NetBackup revision today, version 6.5. This release is nearly complete in its buzzword-compliance, with enhanced support for VTL and backup to disk, data deduplication, CDP, LAN-free backup, SharePoint and Exchange, and even VMware! What’s the matter, Symantec, was Thin Provisioning not ready for release? How about green computing? Holographic storage? Yes, I jest…

Seriously, you gotta cheer when a “big gorilla” app like NetBackup adds this kind of technology, though. CDP and deduplication were great ideas but needed n application to focus them, and data backup is an excellent place to apply them.

And although the press release doesn’t highlight it, the application-specific recovery enhancements look especially tasty to me. NetBackup leverages VCB in VMware but can do file-level restore, which is awesome. And it can also do document-level or full-database restore in SharePoint from the same image. Over in Exchange land, it claims to be able to restore from snapshots instead of the backup image, speeding (all too frequent) recoveries.