VMDK file to LUN storage architecture has been the most usable scenario for years until VMware released Virtual Volumes in vSphere 6.0. In the case of an array with block access, own VMware file system – VMFS  – was used -, and NFS was used for file storage. The array capacity was divided into LUNs or NFS-shares and presented ESXi hosts in the datastore form. Frequently, datastore is a large capacity storage housing numerous VMs. In fact, allocating a separate datastore for each VM is quite inconvenient and time-consuming in terms of administration.

The fast-paced world of system administration is growing on a large scale and picking up steam all the time. The migration of business to the cloud we can see these days is a good example of the above said. Thus, the continuous pursuit of a tool that would simplify the life of a system administrator constantly stays on the agenda of the IT world. The main goal behind the development of the Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is eliminating the long journey of finding the right solution. To simplify the life of system administrators to an even greater extent, the StarWind team has decided to additionally complete the feature set by developing the StarWind Swordfish Provider.

Just recently one of the main virtualization conferences VMworld Europe 2016 has finished. Traditionally, it has been held a while after the main VMworld in the USA. While in the USA VMware was speaking about the new technologies and the future of datacenters, in Europe much more attention was paid to the new features of updated VMware products. The main of them is, of course, VMware vSphere 6.5 server virtualization platform. We’ll start our overview with it.

Many of you have heard of Virtual Volumes (VVols) storage technology, which allows essential increasing of storage I/O performance within VMware vSphere environment by using logical volumes for certain virtual machines components and transferring of some storage operations to disk arrays.