Storage Virtual Appliances unlock the resources of the ESX server and provide a virtual SAN that enables datastores to be shared. By leveraging an available virtual machine, SVAs provide a shared storage environment without having to install a complex shared storage system.
Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA)
Storage appliance software running under VMware ESX® as a virtual machine. SVA takes control of and virtualizes Direct Attached Storage (DAS), for example internal disk drives and/or externally attached array.
- Presents it to VMware ESX over iSCSI as a virtual SAN .
- This fully enables all features which normally require an expensive external SAN High Availability and VMotion.
- Dramatically lowers the cost of deploying a server virtualization environment.
- Traditionally you would purchase 2-3 physical servers, then have expense of purchasing SAN storage.
- Now you can have a SAN using the server’s internal storage!
