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On Sept 11, and also during the VMworld EU 2012, DataCore has announced that SANsymphony-V (“The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud”) is certified as VMware Ready™ and easily integrates with VMware’s portfolio of solutions, allowing data centre and private cloud operators to gain the most from their virtual infrastructure investments.

DataCore’s SANsymphony-V offers seamless integration with:

• VMware vSphere® 5
• VMware vSphere® Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)
• VMware vCenter™ Server
• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ (SRM)

DataCore Software is a long standing member of VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner Program. Thousands of VMware vSphere and SANsymphony-V users are already realising dynamic, virtualised and private cloud environments powered by the hardware of their choice. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V 9.0 offers VMware software users enhanced flexibility and powerful automation benefits, delivering exceptional value to their private cloud and data centre environments. As enterprises and data centre operators continue to upgrade and modernize their infrastructure, they will require such solutions to maximize ROI. Advanced features of the DataCore Storage Hypervisor include automated tiering, thin provisioning and high availability, enabling administrators to gain full value and more effective usage of their costly solid state drive (SSD) deployments.

VMware VAAI

VMware VAAI storage-based hardware acceleration lowers CPU and memory consumption, enables faster deployment, supports VMware vMotion® for storage tasks and disk creation, as well as higher VM consolidation ratios; however, these capabilities only work with VAAI-compliant storage arrays. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V extends VAAI hardware acceleration benefits across heterogeneous storage arrays, regardless of whether those arrays have native VAAI support or the VMFS volumes span the same brand of array enclosure.

The Storage Hypervisor sits in front of all types of storage vendor arrays and devices, presenting DataCore-powered virtual disks/LUNs to VMware vSphere. The software masks the physical characteristics of the underlying storage devices. Therefore, it does not matter which physical storage array is sitting on the back-end. The DataCore storage hypervisor empowers VMware administrators to:

• Replicate LUNs or motion virtual disks across different storage arrays
• Facilitate the implementation of powerful capabilities like VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) on top of those virtualised and replicated disks
• Enable VAAI operations across platforms
• Simplify migrations and VMware Storage vMotion
• Free up the VMkernel for other activities by offloading work to the storage hypervisor

Actually the UNMAP VAAI feature is not yet implemented, but is planned for future produt release.

VMware vCenter Server Plug-In

DataCore has made available a VMware vCenter Server plug-in that integrates enterprise-wide storage hypervisor management with VMware vCenter Server to empower VMware administrators with the ability to easily manage virtual machines (VMs) and storage from a single console. Enterprises can now control and schedule key SANsymphony-V storage virtualisation services, taking snapshots and tasks directly from their VMware vCenter Server Management Platform. The DataCore VMware vCenter Server management plug-in software is available immediately for download to all SANsymphony-V customers. For more information, download the DataCore vCenter Plug-in datasheet.

VMware SRM

DataCore provide a Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware SRM to use this tool in an orchestrated or planned fail-over or fail-back.

Note that SRA is free for charge, but you need DataCore Replication and ASR license option.

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.