Since a single, homogeneous storage pool would potentially contain many different applications and virtual machines this approach resulted in needless complexity and inefficiency.

A storage administrator would configure array resources to present large, homogenous storage pools that would then be consumed by vSphere administrator. Historically, vSphere storage management has been based on constructs defined by the storage array: LUNs and filesystems. Virtual Datastores are purely logical constructs that can be configured on the fly, when needed, without disruption, and don’t require formatting with a file system.The Virtual Datastore defines capacity boundaries, access logic, and exposes a set of data services accessible to the virtual machines provisioned in the pool.

The precise consumption of storage resources eliminates overprovisioning.

vVols improve resource utilization by enabling more flexible consumption of storage resources, when needed and with greater granularity.

vVols simplifies the delivery of storage service levels to applications by providing administrators with a finer control of storage resources and data services at the VM level that can be dynamically adjusted in real-time.

By using policy-driven automation as the operations model, provisioning and change management are simplified and expeditated.

vVols simplifies storage operations by automating manual tasks and reducing operational dependencies between the vSphere Admin and the Storage Admin.

Some of the primary benefits delivered by vVols are focused on operational efficiencies and flexible consumption models. VVols enables application-specific requirements to drive storage provisioning decisions while leveraging the rich set of capabilities provided by existing storage arrays.

VSphere Virtual Volumes or vVols implements the core tenets of the VMware Software-Defined Storage vision to enable a fundamentally more efficient operational model for external storage in virtualized environments, centering it on the application instead of the physical infrastructure.

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