Is VMware Killing the Storage Industry?

That seems to be the message still coming out of Virtual Iron. I thought Ed Walsh's conversation about this had died off a long time ago. Apparently I was mistaken since it came up at a customer again yesterday. Ed is the CEO and President of Virtual Iron. He gave a talk at Storage Decisions late last year that appeared on YouTube. He also recorded a rather humorous "cocktail hour" talk and posted it to YouTube as well. Both say basically the same thing - VMware is killing the storage industry. I really have a hard time believing that.

A little background here. When VMware first came out with our ESX Server platform they created something called VMFS which is a clustered filesystem. VMware did this for a couple of reasons:

1. At the time there wasn't a good filesystem that supported files up to 2 TB in size that was widely used.
2. At the time there was no widely used (in the x86 space) filesystem that supported distributed locking.

VMware needed some place where they could create a chunk of storage, share it between multiple physical hosts and place virtual machine disk files on there. The distributed locking was so multiple disk files on different hosts could be accessed at the same time and get very good performance. This gave birth to VMFS. You can read more on the features and benefits of VMFS here.

As time went on VMware realized they solved another problem by putting VMFS into place - abstracting the SAN. It turns out that most of the people that do the implementations are the ones that own and manage the servers and not the storage. Usually these individuals call up the storage team when they need to connect more storage to a server. With a Virtual Infrastructure, deploying virtual machines becomes very easy and very rapid. Now with a VMFS datastore in place the server managers no longer need to call the SAN team each and every time. You simply deploy a host, get a block of storage and use that storage until it gets full. To the team managing the Virtual Infrastructure this was great. After all, imagine having to deploy an individual LUN for each and every virtual machine in your environment. There are several VMware customers that live around me in the southeast US with over 3,000 virtual machines deployed - that's a lot of LUNs if you do one per VM!! Right there is the value of larger pools of shared storage.

Now here is the point where I could somewhat see justification for Ed's comments. The storage team now is sort of out of the loop on what servers and apps are getting deployed on the servers and storage volumes. The storage team may get a call for a performance problem with a database for example but they don't see where that database is or have any granularity to troubleshoot the problem. A lot of VMware customers actually complained about this many years ago so VMware decided to leverage their broad industry partnerships to fix it.

At the end of last year, VMware introduced an official storage certification program to augment their huge storage alliances. Today nearly every SAN management tool on the market can see and work with ESX Server hosts and storage. Obviously since VMware is owned by EMC both Navisphere and ECC have integrations into ESX Server. NetApp has integrations and all of their advanced features work. Equallogic and LeftHand both have integrations. Heck LeftHand even makes a virtual appliance for shared storage on ESX Server. I could go on and on listing all of the advanced integrations and all of the different vendors. You can find a lot of that information here. Needless to say the storage industry is doing just fine. As a matter of fact you could argue that server virtualization in the x86 space is the best thing that has ever happened to the storage industry. After all, what other compelling reason would you have to put DNS boxes, domain controllers, small app servers, and all of these other boxes on a shared storage infrastructure?

Moving forward, storage abstraction is enabling new and exciting functionality such as Storage VMotion and easy disaster recovery. A whole new marketplace has emerged for backing up virtualized servers efficiently. All of this is happening not just at VMware but at other virtualization vendors as well such as VSS integration into Microsoft's virtualization products. Overall the storage industry is thriving. That's probably the reason why one of the world's largest storage vendors bought VMware several years ago.

Last but not least, to help the storage admins out there, NPIV support has just been added to VMware products. Now you can zone storage directly to a VM and provide QoS and direct monitoring for that VM no matter where it's running. Another powerful feature added from customer requests and broad industry contacts and partnerships.

For customers or analysts reading this...if you have questions about how to integrate your storage into a VMware Virtual Infrastructure environment just contact VMware. With over 100,000 customers deploying VMware in their environment today and global storage alliances they'll be happy to share their experience and knowledge.

So Ed, the storage industry is alive and thriving in VMware environments today. Not to worry. It's time to find another cause to go and fight for. Maybe try global warming or world hunger. VMware is not killing the storage industry. VMware brought virtualization to the x86 space and is making the storage industry thrive.