But users say they won't rush out to upgrade storage arrays to take advantage of the new features. Meanwhile, the Palo, Alto-Calif.-based VMware Inc. continues to walk a political tightrope with its hardware partners with the rollout of the application programming interfaces (APIs).
VAAI features a nice-to-haveThe new vSphere 4.1 features under
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VMworld, a group of VMware engineers warned users that at large scale, such problems may still exist. The VAAI integration would allow storage arrays, which have more scalable and granular locking mechanisms, to handle the process, rather than the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS).
There just isn't value enough to take a risk.
Nasser Mirzai,
senior director of ITTradeBeam Inc.
"I can definitely see it being a gain if you have particularly busy VMs sharing volumes under VMFS," said Eric Parson, a senior systems support engineer at Chicago-based wireless service provider U.S. Cellular, though he said it hasn't been a problem in his environment.
But while users say they understand the value of the new features, most traditionally conservative storage buyers say that it would take six months to a year to modify their environments to accommodate these features, even if every storage vendor had all the features ready today. "There just isn't value enough to take a risk," said Nasser Mirzai, the senior director of IT for trade management software and service company TradeBeam Inc. in San Mateo, Calif. TradeBeam currently has about 200 VMware guests, but plans to spin up hundreds more by the end of the year, " Mirzai said. "I just don't see anything that says, 'I must do this,' and I don't want to make a firmware or forklift upgrade unless I have no other choice."
Furthermore, the kind of integration promised with VAAI is a long time coming, said Randy Weis, a senior solutions architect at GreenPages, an IT solutions provider in Kittery, Maine. , During that time, users in large storage environments have already had to adjust to those conditions and thus won't be busting down doors to add it. "I haven't heard users saying, 'I have to get an array that has that,'" he said. Timeout and locking issues have become "part of the landscape. If you live in the mountains, it snows; if you use block-level storage, you have to deal with file locking."
VMware plays partner politics in the storage marketAt times VMware has had a bumpy road in its relationships with ecosystem partners, including with storage hardware partners that believed VMware had reinvented their wheel with VMFS and Storage VMotion. Storage vendors also complained that VMFS was a black box that didn't give visibility into virtual machine files for common operations such as data replication and backup. VMware's response was a more granular set of APIs developed for vSphere, addressing both array integration and data protection.
But now, according to multiple storage industry sources, VMware has given some vendors preferential treatment with VAAI. EMC Corp. (VMware's parent company) and NetApp Inc. were the first to receive the API code in a software development kit (SDK) from VMware in January, while others received it the next month or later -- and amid a vast number of disk array manufacturers in the market, many still have not received it at all. This has prompted new grumbles among VMware storage partners about perceived favoritism.
"[EMC and NetApp] were the only two companies that got the SDK early enough," said one storage industry source. "When the launch came up, it became clear that some would be able to stake claims others couldn't ... with [EMC CEO Joe] Tucci's boasting on [a recent] earnings [call] on EMC having the most VMware APIs in the industry, it annoys folks when things like this happen. "
VMware did not specify when individual partners received the VAAI SDK, but did acknowledge a tiered system for rolling out the APIs. "When we created the VAAI, we worked with a group of design partners so that we could get the technology in a state where it would provide the most value to the broadest set of customers and partners," a VMware spokesperson wrote in an email to SearchServerVirtualization.com.
The "design partners" named by VMware are Dell, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Hewlett-Packard Co. and NetApp. Combined, these vendors control the lion's share of the market for storage subsystems, and by now the vast majority of major vendors in the space, including those left out of the "design partner" phase of the process, have received the SDK. But there are some notable absences in the "design partners" group that received the SDK first, including IBM, IBM's OEM partner LSI Corp., thin-provisioning pioneer 3PAR, and an EqualLogic competitor in midrange disk arrays, Compellent Technologies Inc. Compellent has made hay with its VMware integration in the past, but HDS and HP have both announced major partnerships with Microsoft in the last year.
By the time most users are ready to upgrade to arrays that support VAAI, most storage vendors will be shipping similar features. But some users are made at least a little nervous by the potential for continued friction between VMware and storage partners.
"Depending on how they work with [partners] or not, if one gets upset, you'll start seeing the same sort of functions with KVM [Kernel-based Virtual Machine], maybe, or jumping on Hyper-V's bandwagon," said Tom Becchetti, a senior systems engineer at a large manufacturing company. Partners may say, "'OK, [if] you're going to do that, we're going to go work with Microsoft,'" potentially leaving users caught in the crossfire of shifting vendor alliances. "It could get interesting as this all shakes out."
Beth Pariseau is a Senior News Writer for SearchServerVirtualization.com. Write to her at mailto:mbpariseau@techtarget.com.