Storage Automation in VMM 2012 - Overview

Hi, I am Hector Linares, Senior Program Manager on the SCVMM team. This blog is an overview of the storage automation feature set in System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012. The goal of this feature is to simplify and automate the discovery, allocation, and assignment of storage assets in a virtualized environment.

Summary

VMM 2012 introduces enhanced networking, storage, and physical server management that enables enterprises to create on premise private clouds. The key investments in storage include modeling and automation. Modeling helps administrators understand what storage assets they have and how the underlying SAN infrastructure relates to their Hyper-V environment. Automation helps streamline common storage workflows – provisioning new storage, adding capacity to a Hyper-V or cluster, and rapid provisioning of new VMs using the SAN.

The automation of storage in the context of a Hyper-V environment helps reduce the time to market of new virtual servers, reduce the complexity of using the SAN in a virtualization environment, and take advantage of all the capabilities of the underlying SAN while delivering excellent performance. This level of integration will help customers fully leverage the SAN for their Hyper-V environment.

VMM 2012 uses a new storage service that communicates to SMI-S based storage providers for active management of storage arrays. Leveraging an industry standard like SMI-S helps VMM deliver value-add functionality to customers across a wide range of storage devices while minimizing the engineering effort and time to market

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