FAQ

Are we going to see a virtual volume manager or virtual routers in VMware ESX?

I hear rumors all the time about what's going to be in the next release of ESX. A full-featured [virtual] volume manager in ESX certainly would be a nice feature.

About the author
Rod Lucero is chief technical officer of St. Paul, Minn.-based VAR VMPowered. Listen to the rest of Rod's answers on VMware by downloading our VMware podcast.

Existing VMware file systems today are very robust -- they can be extended in size online, but I don't think anyone really ever shrinks volumes very much, so I don't really see a huge need for that. [VMware's] VMFS [Virtual Machine File System] is designed to house VMware disk files and not meet the need of every possible data storage need. So if we see [a virtual volume manager in ESX], that's great. If not, a well-designed implementation doesn't need one.

As for virtual routers, I don't see where that makes a whole lot of sense. I don't want to see ESX become a multipurpose operating system. After all, it's a hypervisor, and a really good one. I'd rather let the router folks do the routing, just like I wouldn't want to see virtual machines running in a router.

Return to the VMWare FAQ guide and read the rest of Rod's expert responses.


This was first published in January 2008

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