HPE VMware vVols Policy Management - VMworld 2019
Transcript
>> So Erik, talk to me, how does HPE enable enterprises to take advantage of their existing storage landscape to better manage VMs and VM storage? >> So before we talk about Storage Policy Based Management, I just want to talk about some of the challenges with traditional storage and how we apply the capability of the array to the virtual machine. So, with traditional storage here, our storage array is going to advertise, or we're going to take certain features in the array, like replication, dedupe, compression, QoS.
We apply this at the LUN level for these VMs are all within that LUN. We can't apply these capabilities directly to the individual virtual machines. So, that's just a limitation of the VMFS and that why VMware created VVols. So, with VVols, what we can do, we don't have LUNs anymore. The LUNs go away and essentially now all my array capabilities, I can apply to individual virtual machines. You know, one by one, if I want to replicate multiple VMs, I could do that.
Apply this there, or however I want to do it. I can now apply those at the VM level. So, how that looks like in a Storage Policy Based Management then, is my storage array here is going to then advertise the capabilities that it's capable of. Let's put the three down here. Like, we're going to do compression and we're going to do dedupe, and we're going to do replication, and then what we're going to to then now, is advertise those capabilities up and that.
So, we're going to advertise these up and then now that the vSphere is aware of what those things are capable of we can go into vSphere and we can create storage policies. So, I'll have a policy here that has this capability in it. And then I'll have a policy here that has this capability in it. Maybe I want this one over here as well. Now that I have these policies built out in vSphere, I could then assign those to my virtual machines, like that.
And then I'll assign this policy to another VM, and then what happens at that point, is Storage Policy Based Management ensures compliance. So, on the storage array itself, when I create a VM, assign it to a storage policy, essentially everything that the array is capable of that's with that policy is going to be applied direct to those individual virtual machines. On the LUN, I'd be doing this at the LUN level, which is less efficient. Maybe I don't want to replicate all the VMs at that LUN or do dedupe on all the VMs.
With policy based management I could do those via policies, apply those to individual virtual machines. That's what VVols is all about, is the VM level granularity where I can now do things at the VM level, the array has full visibility to virtual machine, because VMs are written natively to the storage array. Where over here with LUNs we never were able to see inside a LUN. So, we couldn't do things at the VM level and that's what VVols is all about.
