Release Notes

7 VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes on Dell PS Series | 2028-N-WP-V
In previous versions of vSphere, VMware provided a datastore cluster feature. This feature groups similar
datastores under one datastore cluster object. The advantage of this is that a vSphere administrator could
deploy a virtual machine to the datastore cluster, and let vSphere place the virtual machine on a datastore
that has sufficient capacity. However, as thin provisioned VMDKs or I/O latencies grow, virtual machines need
to be migrated using vMotion® to other datastores within the cluster. While this does provide a hands off
approach to datastore capacity management, a storage penalty is gained on the SAN because the blocks on
the source datastore are not automatically unmapped by vSphere. The blocks are marked as used by the SAN
until a manual unmap operation is run.
• Wasted resources, wasted time, high costs
The above limitations require manual intervention from vSphere administrators, and in some instances direct
cooperation with storage administrators. When these problems occur, it takes a long time to resolve them and
consumes valuable administrator time. The flexibility and granularity of Virtual Volumes enables vSphere and
storage administrators to deploy more efficient and dynamic environments, empowering them to meet the
ever-changing demands of business with ease.