Release Notes

5 VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes on Dell PS Series | 2028-N-WP-V
1 Introduction to Virtual Volumes
Enabled by the second generation VMware
®
APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) provider included with Virtual Storage
Manager 4.5, Virtual Volumes enables storage to be virtual machine aware, and for virtual machines to be first class
objects in the SAN.
With Virtual Volumes, little changes in the day-to-day activities of a vSphere administrator; a virtual machine is still a
virtual machine, and the workflows within VMware vCenter® do not change. However, on the storage side, a virtual
machine now consists of a collection of volumes on the SAN, rather than a collection of virtual machines sharing a
single volume. This enables SAN volume manipulation capabilities to perform storage-related virtual machine tasks
such as virtual machine cloning and virtual machine deployment.