vStorage Session - given by Scott Davis, was a great session from a

tech viewpoint. The enhancements in the vStorage area are excellent,

I've been on thew VI4beta, now vSphere, so I had read and played with

some of them but some of the other things and the directions they're

going in are very interesting.

A number of quick takeaways were

around performance  and enhancements, performance at the storage level

has been almost doubled since ESX3.5,

Scott quoted a figure of up to 200,000 IOPs as the limit of an esx

hosts IO capacity which is pretty staggering. Enhancements include

enhanced SvMotion, it's going to be possible to do it through the gui,

the introduction  of paravirtualised drivers for SCSI, iSCSI stack

improvements around performance and scaling and the ability to now use

offload engines on network hardware to process iSCSI packets through

the vmkernel interface. FCoE also got a mention and the converged

networks that it creates with Scott tipping this to be big in the

future.

Also

a lot of focus on better integration with storage vendor arrays and

using the array where possible to offload functionality like snapshot

and linked clones. The new PSA (Pluggable Storage Architecture) allows

this and the driver framework within this allows for storage vendors to

either use the VMWare provided storage drivers with some lightweight

extensions or completely replace the VMWare driver set with their own

as has been done by EMC who have created a build of Powerpath for ESX,

in Beta right now but probaly won't be for too long I'd imagine.