The calling of support for virtual servers comes ahead of next week’s VMworld conference to be held in San Francisco, California.
Hitachi’s storage subsidiary HDS said that its UPS disk array and its smaller sister the NSC have both been certified for use with VMware’s Infrastructure 3 software.
Hitachi’s arrays were already certified to work VMware virtual servers. The new certification now covers the storage management functions on those devices, such as port priority control or QoS, secure multi-tenancy and data migration services.
EMC’s Avamar-originated data de-duplicating backup system is now available encapsulated in a virtual machine. That means that as well running on a physical server in branch offices or data centers, it can now run on VMware virtual servers. Replication of data can be completed between any combination of physical and virtually-hosted servers.
Avamar-inside-a-virtual-machine is easier to deploy on a VMware ESX server than Avamar on a physical server, EMC said. The VMware-friendly Avamar also of course helps with multi-tenancy, or the consolidation of multiple applications onto single Windows or Linux servers. Separately, EMC said it has also created a hardware and software package combining Avamar software, a server to run it on with some internal storage, and external disk or tape.
DataCore says it has been running its thin-provisioning storage virtualization software on virtual platforms for a long while. But it is only this week that it is officially offering to support its products running on VMware virtual servers — and on XenSource and Virtual Iron virtual servers.
Given the I/O load on an in-band appliance that might be virtualizing disk space handed to for multiple servers, customers might not see huge advantage in running DataCore’s software on a virtual server sharing physical resources with other applications.
DataCore CEO George Teixeira stressed that all of DataCore’s products – including its $1,000 virtualization tools – will run on virtual hardware. He said the virtual machines would make good platforms for test and development, departmental use, or simply as a means to test out DataCore’s products.
FalconStor Software has ported its flagship disk virtualization, virtual tape library and CDP software to VMware’s virtual server, in the process slashing its entry price.
The virtually-hosted software is called FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance for VMware, and it carries a list price of $7,995. That is a lot cheaper than what FalconStor says is around $25,000-odd entry price for its physically-hosted server. But while the virtual-hosted software sports the same features of the physically-hosted version, it is limited to managing up to 8TB of disk for up to 16 host servers.
FalconStor expects the early users of the virtually-hosted to be enterprises with remote offices.
