VMware vSphere 4.1 Delivers 10X Faster Virtual Machine Creation and Movement

July 19, 2010

The three new storage integrations with the new VMware vSphere 4.1 enablie customers of all sizes to improve the efficiency of their VMware environments. Now delivering more than 55 integration points with VMware solutions, the combined solutions are easy-to-use with the best overall performance. EMC has by far the most integrated solution support for VMware environments and continues to underscore its position as the number one choice in storage for VMware environments with customers choosing EMC two times as often as any other vendor.

VMware vSphere 4.1 includes new VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). Through VAAI, VMware vSphere can now offload specific storage operations to EMC's industry leading enterprise and mid-range arrays increasing both overall system performance and efficiency. Unlike many storage vendors, EMC supports all three of VMware's new vStorage API’s including:

Full Copy. EMC delivers hardware accelerated copying of data by performing all operations on the array. Customers can achieve up to 10 times faster virtual machine creation and data movement via VMware Storage vMotion.
Block Zero. EMC delivers hardware accelerated initialization reducing Input/Output by up to a factor of 10 for common tasks such as creating new virtual machines. This feature is especially beneficial when creating fault-tolerant (FT) enabled or thinly provisioned virtual machines.
Hardware Assisted Locking. EMC delivers improved locking controls on VMFS storing up to 10 times as many virtual machines per datastore and booting virtual machines up to four times faster. This improves performance of common tasks such as virtual machine migration, powering many virtual machines on or off and creating a virtual machine from a template.

"Tight integration with VMware solutions extends the value of both storage and server virtualization to customers. The VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) allows the array to be 'virtualization aware' and enables virtual machines to offload specific storage functionality," said David Vellante, chief research advocate, Wikibon. "Enabling VAAI will solve many of today's nagging storage problems for VMware customers and dramatically improve performance, simplify provisioning and eliminate waste. Our models show that an organization with $1B in revenue that spends 4% of that revenue on IT will save $20M over a five-year period by pursuing an integrated virtualization approach."

"EMC is working as closely as ever with VMware to expand our integration points for customers to easily take advantage of new VMware technology advancements," said EMC's Chad Sakac, Vice President, VMware Technology Alliance. "Our broad portfolio integrates at every level of the vSphere stack – for every customer, using every protocol and solutions of every scale. And we're delivering solutions that are the simplest to manage and the most efficient – that's why EMC continues to be the number one storage vendor of choice for VMware environments."

VAAI is the newest set of APIs added to the VMware vStorage API family and EMC is one of the only multiprotocol storage vendors to support all four sets of VMware vStorage APIs which in addition to VAAI include:

VMware vStorage API for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager offers customers the ability to reduce the recovery time objectives of a site disaster from weeks or day to minute by automating the recovery process. EMC has adapters for all replication products including EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), EMC RecoverPoint, EMC MirrorView, and EMC Celerra Replicator and furthers these integrations by offering the ability to automatically failback to the primary site once the outage has been mitigated.
VMware vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) leverages the snapshot capabilities of VMware vSphere to enable virtual machine image backup without requiring downtime. Fully supported on EMC Avamar, administrators have the ability to efficiently deduplicate backup data within and across virtual machines, significantly reducing backup time and backup storage. In addition, they can recover a single file from an image backup to a virtual machine without installing any software agents. Taking advantage of the Changed Block Tracking feature of VADP, combined with the Avamar architecture for deduplication, further reduces backup windows, and dramatically shortens recovery time.
VMware vStorage API for Multipathing provides mulitpathing integration with EMC PowerPath VE adding higher path availability, providing dynamic load balancing, and greatly increasing performance on VMware vSphere.

VMware-integrated capabilities are made even simpler through the use of free EMC plugins for VMware vCenter. With the plugins, VMware administrators have the ability to manage their VMware vSphere cluster, virtual machines, and storage all from within the VMware vCenter management console. These capabilities are offered on all of EMC's storage platforms and include provisioning, configuration, management and monitoring of both block and NAS storage. VMware-aware EMC Unisphere gives the storage array itself deep insight into the virtualized environment. EMC is the only storage vendor to provide this integration in both directions: vCenter to the array and the array to vCenter.