Enabling Shared Storage for Virtual Machines

Access to shared storage in a VMware Infrastructure 3 environment is made possible by VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS), high-performance cluster file system designed specifically for virtual machines.

Designed, constructed and optimized for the virtual server environment, VMFS increases resource utilization by providing multiple virtual machines with shared access to a consolidated pool of clustered storage. VMFS also provides the foundation for distributed infrastructure services such as live migration of virtual machines and virtual disk files, as well as distributed resource scheduling, consolidated backup and automated disaster recovery.

As a file system, VMFS stores all the files that make up the virtual machine in a single directory. Optimized to support large files and also performing many small concurrent writes. With automated handling virtual machine files, VMFS provides encapsulation of the entire virtual machine so that it can easily become part of a disaster recovery solution. In fact, VMFS is one of the key reasons why VMware Infrastructure 3 was named TechTarget’s 2006 Disaster Recovery Product of the Year.

As a logical volume manager, VMFS enables an interface to storage resources so that several types of storage (SAN, iSCSI and SAN) can be presented as datastores on which virtual machines can reside. Enabling dynamic growth of those datastores through aggregation of storage resources, VMFS provides the ability to increase a shared storage resource pool with minimal or no downtime.