Independent of how an operating system is hosted, consistent storage management tools will save the administrator time and reduce the complexity of the environment. Storage Foundation in the virtual machine can provide the same command set, storage namespace and environment as in a non-virtual environment.

In VMware vSphere, VMFS does not have the capability to mirror storage. This forces users to use mirrored LUN's to provide this functionality to the virtual machines. With Veritas Volume Manager running in the virtual machine, utilizing raw device mapping, data can be protected with mirroring in the virtual machine, including the ability to mirror between storage arrays.

With SFCFSHA and Flexible Storage Sharing, you can also mirror storage on local disks directly attached to an ESXi host to local disks directly attached to a remote ESXi host, whether these disks are presented as raw device mappings or VMDK files.

Storage Foundation can make painful migrations of data from physical to virtual environments easier and safer to execute. With Storage Foundation there is no need to actually copy any data from source to destination; rather, the administrator re-assigns the same storage (or a copy of it for a test migration) to the virtual environment. Once the storage is assigned and configured into the virtual machine, Veritas Volume Manager will scan the device tree and discover the disk group and volume structure.

Figure: Migration workflow describes an example workflow.

Veritas Volume Manager is agnostic to the actual physical device entry. That is, Veritas Volume Manager does not care if the device is /dev/sdb or /dev/sdaz. This transparency makes it easy to move storage from one node to another, or between physical and virtual machines.