VMworld, the annual worldwide conference for EMC’s VMware division, took place this week (September 11-13) in San Francisco, California. When discussing VMware, server virtualization first comes to mind – not surprising, since VMware is currently the industry leader for server virtualization software. However, server virtualization was not the only focus of the VMworld conference this week – several types of storage products were announced and highlighted as well. Numerous storage vendors were on hand to espouse the benefits of their products in VMware ESX Server environments. These product announcements obviously provided storage vendors with a prime opportunity to share in the VMworld limelight, but more importantly, they underscored the pertinent role that data storage plays in server virtualization.
This week’s storage announcements covered a wide range of areas including management, virtual SANs, replication, and disaster recovery:
- On the management front, Vizioncore announced its Global Alliance Partner Program, which is designed to more tightly integrate data backup, data migration, and replication for VMware environments.
- LeftHand Networks released a software version of its SAN hardware. This software product runs as a virtual machine on an ESX Server and does not require a separate physical SAN.
- Emulex announced an ESX-compatible host bus adapter that permits a separate connection for each virtual machine and sets the foundation for fabric zoning, a SAN security feature.
- With regard to replication and disaster recovery, VMware itself announced its own Site Recovery Manager, which is intended to simplify and automate failover for replication and disaster recovery.
- Finally, Symantec announced support of VMware environments with its VERITAS Cluster Server product. Cluster Server is a disaster recovery product that provides automatic failover from one site to another in the event that one site is lost for any reason.
These announcement examples illustrate the ongoing trend of tighter integration between server and storage virtualization. Without a doubt, more of these types of announcements will follow – not only for VMware, but for other server virtualization implementations as well. From a technical standpoint, there are certainly differences in implementations of virtualization for servers and for storage. However, from an end user or IT administrator perspective, the expectations are not set in terms of server or storage virtualization, but rather in such terms as cost savings, simplified monitoring, management, and automation. Virtualization is not a product per se, but actually a means to an end. Virtualization simplifies other tasks. Rather than speak of server, storage, and I/O virtualization, the discussion will eventually center on such areas as consolidation, data migration, security, and disaster recovery.
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