6.4. New vStorage Features in vSphere 4

In this section, we'll cover all the changes and new features in vSphere 4 that are related to storage. Together, these can result in huge efficiency, availability, and performance improvements for most customers.

Some of these include new features inherent to vSphere:

  • Thin Provisioning

  • VMFS Expansion

  • VMFS Resignature Changes

  • Hot Virtual Disk Expansion

  • Storage VMotion Changes

  • Paravirtualized vSCSI

  • Improvements to the Software iSCSI Initiator

  • Storage Management Improvements

And some of these are new features which focus on integration with third party storage-related functionality:

  • VMDirectPath I/O and SR-IOV

  • vStorage APIs for Multipathing

  • vStorage APIs

Let's take a look at what's new!

6.4.1. Thin Provisioning ...

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