What Is VMware?

What Is VMware?

VMware is a software company that specializes in virtualization and cloud computing. Virtualization is about creating a software representation of something, like a server, so that it can be accessed and used independently from the constraints of its physical hardware. 

In this article, we’ll take a look at VMware’s virtualization services and how you can use them to bring agility to your storage infrastructure.

Benefits of VMware

As a leader in virtualization, VMware provides a number of products and services that are uniquely suited to virtualizing a data center. Benefits of leveraging VMware for virtualization include:

• Cost savings of partitioning a single physical server into multiple virtual machines
• Greater IT agility and flexibility to distribute your workload across your infrastructure as you see fit
• Streamlined deployment, management, and maintenance of virtual machines
• Granular virtualization of storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) arrays with virtual volumes (vVols)

Pure Storage Integrations with VMware

Pure Storage® supports VMware vSphere Storage APIs Array Integration (VAAI) to provide:

• Block zero feature to accelerate virtual disk initialization
• Full copy to offload virtual machine copying and deployment
• Space reclamation to ensure efficient use of capacity
• Hardware-assisted locking to enable large-capacity datastores with enhanced scale of simultaneous operations

In addition to general integration with VMware virtual machines, Pure Storage also has several packaged solutions available on the VMware marketplace, including:

• FlashArray™ vSphere Client Plugin for native management of FlashArray storage directly within the vSphere client
• Pure1® VM Analytics, which provides visibility of the I/O path from VM to FlashArray
• FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter, which integrates with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to provide native array replication and protection policies for simplified disaster recovery and automated data protection 
• Pure Storage Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations, which provides a comprehensive data-rich view of your entire storage array, including dependency hierarchical maps, heat maps for capacity and performance, and dashboards/reporting

As a VMware Advanced Technology Alliance Partner, Pure Storage works closely with VMware to help customers maximize the synergy between their virtual and physical infrastructure.