I am often questioned during my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar presentations about VMware's Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). This system is fairly straightforward and concept: VMware provides native multipathing support for a variety of storage arrays, and allows third parties to substitute their own plug-ins at various points in the stack. But the profusion of … [Read more...] about VMware PSP and SATP in Plain English
vSphere 4
IBM Adds VAAI Support to XIV and SVC
VMware's vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) is one of the most-important storage technology advances of the decade, allowing the VMware ESX to integrate and coordinate operations with supported enterprise storage arrays. After an explosion of initial support, however, VAAI implementation slowed. IBM was notably absent from the party, listing only partial support for a … [Read more...] about IBM Adds VAAI Support to XIV and SVC
A VMware Hypervisor For Networkers?
As my friend Stu Miniman pointed out, a recent VMware video suggests the company is about to jump into networking in a big way. Dubbed "vFabric," This new offering would be a generic hypervisor for virtual network devices, from load balancers to security appliances, and would presumably be integrated with the existing vNetwork Distributed Switch functionality. This appears to … [Read more...] about A VMware Hypervisor For Networkers?