Broadcom discontinues vVols storage capability for VMware
The vVols capability, a VMware storage feature for the past decade, is being sunset in VCF 9 and discontinued in VCF 9.1 as Broadcom continues to winnow the VMware catalog.
Broadcom will no longer offer a capability that connects and manages VMware through external storage platforms.
The vendor said it will deprecate the VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes capability starting with the launch of VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation version 9, which was released last month. The vVols feature will be fully removed in VCF and VVF version 9.1.
Broadcom and storage industry analysts said vVols never gained much adoption among users, despite existing for almost a decade. Users and other analysts saw the feature as a way to use third-party storage without a deeper plunge into the VMware ecosystem.
The elimination of vVols from VMware comes after Broadcom and storage vendor partners announced continued support and enhancements for the capability at last year's VMware Explore, which coincided with Broadcom CEO Hock Tan's first announcement of VCF 9.
The vVols feature enables customers to directly manage storage platforms and devices separate from vSAN, the VMware software-defined storage component. It automates third-party provisioning based on what a virtual machine or application needs by abstracting storage hardware without administrator input.
Broadcom wants to make its VMware private cloud software stack all-inclusive for the customer's data center, according to Brent Ellis, an analyst at Forrester Research.
The vVols [capability] allowed VMware to give more money to storage partners.
Brent EllisAnalyst, Forrester Research
Keeping customers fully inside the VMware ecosystem developed by Broadcom, alongside the controversial new subscription model, led to the vendor cutting out external threats, he said.
"The net effect is they're focusing on internally reinforcing their platform rather than allowing people to use a different network or storage stack," Ellis said. "They want you to go through VCF and vSAN. It reinforces their licensing model and gives them a lot more stickiness with the customer."
Storage separation
In an emailed statement to Informa TechTarget, Broadcom representatives said the excision of vVols from VCF 9 likely won't affect many users due to the feature's low adoption rate over the years and forthcoming updates to vSAN.
"vVols did not deliver this consistent operational model across on-premises, edge, and cloud providers because it was not adopted or made available by most of our public [and] sovereign cloud partners," Broadcom said in the email. "Overall, vVols adoption has remained low over the lifetime of the program, becoming a niche solution for a small segment of the vSphere customer base."
The VCF 9 update still supports external Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) block data storage and Network File System (NFS) file data storage. The vSAN capability can unite these services and the core vSAN technology under a single console for unified management, health alerts and other common administrative tasks, according to Broadcom.
Future updates will enable partner hyperscale clouds to offer vSAN Express Storage Architecture for hybrid cloud storage management. Early supporters will include VMware Cloud Foundation on AWS, Google Cloud VMware Engine and Azure VMware Solution.
Customers, through message boards such as Reddit, said they were informed about the upcoming change about a month before the discontinuation through partners or Broadcom representatives. Some posters reiterated Broadcom's view that the feature lacked capabilities and uptake, making the loss minimal, while others said they preferred using vVols over Broadcom's planned alternatives.
"I actually would hate to go back to VMFS after using vvol," one user wrote. "I like the instantaneous snapshot deletion in vvol and would avoid going back to slow error prone snapshot merges with VMFS. Some vvol implementations had issues early on but it seems a lot more stable now."
Streamlining the portfolio
Broadcom's elimination of vVols and sale of the VeloCloud SD-WAN business to Arista Networks show a company streamlining its software portfolio to support the core VMware private cloud business, Ellis said. And vSAN will likely pick up some of the technology associated with vVols as Broadcom will likely continue to make VMware the de facto virtualization platform for enterprises, regardless of customer or partner grousing.
"Broadcom has more than a year to figure out how the different systems they have work and how they want their [consolidated products] to work together," Ellis said. "This disrupts the storage partner ecosystem they had and drives customers toward vSAN."
Previously, storage vendors NetApp and Pure Storage both said they planned to support existing and future vVols capabilities through partner announcements at the Explore 2024 show last August.
Pure Storage will continue to support existing storage services within VMware, including VMFS and NFS, and will attempt to bring vVols capabilities into other services, according to Tricia Stream, senior director of public relations at Pure Storage.
"Pure Storage has many customers leveraging vVols," Stream said. "We are working to bring vVols value to existing paths, as well as additional options, as we build ongoing relationships with providers whose offerings are built on similar principles."
The loss of vVols likely won't have too much of an impact on VMware's bottom line, as the technology never gained traction among customers in its decade of existence, said Marc Staimer, founder and president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, echoing Broadcom's view.
"Most of the storage vendors found few if any of the VMware customers were using vVols," Staimer said. "It added unnecessary administration and didn't offer all that much value."
VMware customers can still connect to external storage resources manually, but most will likely use their vSAN software included in the VCF purchase to avoid further complexity, Ellis said. Above all other concerns, vVols ultimately helped to sell competitor storage over VMware's own offerings.
The idea of supporting other hardware made more sense in the past, when VMware was owned by a storage vendor or an independent software developer, but less so under Broadcom, he added.
"The vVols [capability] allowed VMware to give more money to storage partners," Ellis said.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
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