Virtual Volumes is an effective feature which is unveiled by VMware from its vSphere 6 release, to have a sophisticated storage management on virtual environment. It’s a kind of feature which introduces the changes on provisioning of how VM’s are stored and managed.
It focuses on on how the storage of virtual environment could provide more efficiency on the basis of VM’s level storage rather than the physical infrastructure. Virtual Volumes provide ways to describe compliances to a VM that contains various performance and service-level agreement requirements. The VM’s will be automatically placed on the storage array that fits those compliances.
Advantages of Virtual Volumes
By using the virtual volumes on the virtual environment, it’s very easy to have appropriate storage services that fits the requirements of any specific virtual machine rather than having to worry about a proper one which suits a pool of VM’s.
In the traditional snapshot method, it takes snapshot of the entire unit which consist of several VM’s, but with virtual volumes snapshot creation of a single VM is made possible.
Business organisation can choose Virtual Volumes to have a simple and efficient storage method rather than having storage models that are having unique capabilities. Since the Virtual Volumes are having sophistications in terms of storage management, the management of virtual environment is made simpler for the IT admins compared to the existing model.
To deploy Virtual Volumes, the storage hardware has to support the vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness.
Virtual Volumes can virtualize the SAN and NAS devices as a Virtual Volume datastore to have one or more storage arrays. The Virtual Volume datastore does not needs to be formatted with any file system.
The Virtual Volumes do not depend on the physical storage representation and each of the Virtual Volumes are independent. The storage management will be with VM level and not with array based or software based data services.
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