Storage resources are essentially virtual volumes -- an abstract combination of physical storage resources in the datacenter. These resources can come from Directly Attached Storage (DAS) disks and from Storage Area Network (FC SAN or iSCSI SAN) disks or be a combination of both. Virtual Volume Management gives you a simple and easily understood model for allocating your storage.

All devices are transparent to the guest operating systems and are represented as SCSI disks connected to a virtual BUS or as IDE disks through an emulated Intel controller. This hides the complexity of managing physical storage. The particular storage type (FC SAN, DAS SCSI, DAS SAS, iSCSI) is completely transparent to the guests.

With the Virtual Iron virtual volume management, you can have multiple Virtual Volume Groups in each Virtual Datacenter resource group. You can also create as many Virtual Disks as you want and easily copy, export and import virtual disks (they are, after all, just files) into or out of the resource group. New physical disks can also be easily added without powering down existing physical servers or the storage subsystem.

The virtual volume management offers precise resource controls to allow mapping of virtual disks to physical LUNS, dynamic resource allocation and easy reconfiguration of disks.

Virtual Volume Management is one the key ingredients for building virtual datacenters.

Tomorrow, I'll write on network resources. For part 1 on virtual infrastructure, click here.