VMware or Microsoft: Offloading your Storage

Storage is one the main key factors we look at when trying to improve our virtualization environments.  It is also probably one of the most costly, not only from a $$$ perspective but also a performance perspective.  I know a lot of you have made large investments in your storage solutions.  Especially if you are running a lot of virtualization workloads.

When you look at functionality provided by Live Migration or vMotion, having fast storage can dramatically improve the performance and stability of these tools.  At the end of the day, improving storage should not only improve your virtualization environment but also your overall server environment.  In today’s article, I am going to talk about two very comparable technologies:

• Windows Server Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX)
• VMware’s vSphere API for Array Integration (VAAI)

While the post will focus on ODX, because this is one main areas of improvements in Windows Server 2012 that you may not be aware of.  Secondly, ODX and VAAI have essentially has the same goals.  To help storage vendors provide hardware assistance to speed up I/O operations that are more efficiently accomplished in the storage hardware.  In other words why do it in software when hardware is better both Microsoft and VMware believe this when it comes to storage for your virtualization environments.

 

To read the entire article, click here -

 

VMware or Microsoft: Offloading your Storage

 

-Cheers!