VMware Virtual Machine File System: Technical Overview and Best Practices

The VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high performance cluster file system that allows virtualization to scale beyond the boundaries of a single system. Designed, constructed, and optimized for the virtual server environment, VMFS increases resource utilization by providing multiple virtual machines with shared access to a consolidated pool of clustered storage. And VMFS provides the foundation for virtualization spanning multiple servers, enabling services such as VMware Vmotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, and VMware High Availability. VMFS also reduces management overhead by providing a highly effective virtualization management layer, one that is especially suitable for large-scale enterprise data centers. Administrators employing VMFS find it easy and straightforward to benefit from the greater efficiency and increased storage utilization offered by the use of shared resources.