Beth Pariseau posted an interesting article on the SearchServerVirtualization.com website giving more information about the expected VMware Aware Storage APIs (VASA). The VASA will be provided by VMware with support from several storage partners, and will provide improved visibility into the physical storage infrastructure through vCenter and CapacityIQ.
VASA will be a standardized API that all storage vendors can write to that will actually push data into the vCenter database, so that analytics products can do additional analysis on the data.
"…We include the vSphere host’s perspective of LUNs and VMFS volumes," wrote Martin Klaus, group manager of product marketing for VMware, in an email. "Generally, these metrics are sufficient to track from a capacity management standpoint when the environment is virtualized…"
The new APIs could also lay the groundwork for storage infrastructure management and automation through vCenter, providing advanced possibilities like a storage equivalent to the Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) feature or an enhanced ability to coordinate and automate Storage vMotion data migrations.
Wikibon’s Floyer wrote: "The roadmap for integrating storage into the virtualized infrastructure journey will focus on greater flexibility to meet rapidly changing demands. Storage itself will essentially become invisible, whereby the days of carving out and manually managing LUNs and file systems to support virtualization will come to an end."
MacAulay Brown’s Seaman added, "What I would like [my] 3PAR [disk array] to do is better integrate storage management functions, like LUN provisioning [or] tuning a LUN, within vCenter. If a storage DRS function could be tied to the 3PAR system reporter or real-time stats, then automatically move VMs to different LUNs based on I/O loads, [it] could [also] be useful."