Release Notes

Introduction to Virtual Volumes
5 Dell EMC SC Series and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes Best Practices | 3161-BP-SC
1 Introduction to Virtual Volumes
Delivery of virtual machine and cloud storage through VMware
®
vSphere
®
Virtual Volumes
™
(vVols) changes
how storage is managed. Traditional shared storage management has matured over the years. Consolidating
virtual machines onto a minimal number of datastores has been successful past through present and will
continue to be a successful paradigm for years to come. However, with many array based integrations such
as tiering, data deduplication, compression, RAID, snapshots, replication, and other data protection strategies
occurring at the volume or datastore layer, the consolidated approach is not without identifiable challenges.
Virtual Volumes address these challenges by allowing these integrations to be defined at the virtual machine
or even application level. Management, deployment, and adherence becomes autonomous through vSphere
integrated software defined storage policies. The end result is more granularity, greater scalability, and
efficiency, Dell
™
Storage Center OS (SCOS) 7.0 and Dell Storage Manager (DSM) 2016 R1 introduce
compatibility and integration with Virtual Volumes.