NetApp Announces New VASA Architecture in Commitment to vVols
vVols has been VMware’s primary external storage focus for a few years now. We are working to add features and functionality only available on the vVols architecture. Don’t worry, VMFS and NFS aren’t going away, we are just focusing primarily on vVols for development.
We work closely with our storage partners to help provide customers with the best possible experience. There’s still some work to be done, but a few of our partners have some exciting developments on vVols. One of our original design partners, NetApp, has been very busy completely re-writing their VASA (vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness) to be future-proof, with Netapp’s new scalable VASA.
There are two ways a storage vendor can implement the VASA; embedded in the controller and as an appliance, and there are pros and cons to both. NetApp has chosen to change from an embedded to a container-based appliance. With their scale-out, container-based solution, the possibility of an outage is greatly reduced. This helps with the con of managing a single VM appliance and the possible impact if that single VM fails. You can read more from their initial announcement. The Top Five Reasons You Should Be Excited About NetApp’s Next-Generation vVols Solution
NetApp has published a new article highlighting the value of the vVols solution for customers, and why NetApp chose to completely re-write their VASA. Make sure to head over to NetApp’s blog a read the latest on their new vVols development.
Why now is the perfect time to make the move to vVols for your VMware vSphere environments.
For more information on vVols, see the Getting Started with vVols article.