Xiotech announced Virtual View, a new add-on for its ICON Manager user interface that simplifies storage monitoring, management and provisioning tasks in virtual environments. Virtual View, designed for users of Xiotech's Emprise 7000 and Magnitude 3D 4000 storage systems, enables administrators to manage storage in their VMware infrastructure environments from a single interface. Users can have a global view of the three storage layers (array, VMware ESX and virtual machine) from a single console and then automate configuration across all layers. As a result, storage management becomes faster and easier with less risk of misconfigurations.

The Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis just began implementing VMware Infrastructure 3 and is backing up all of its storage on a Xiotech storage system. Scott Ladewig, networking and operations manager, Information Services, at the school, has tested Virtual View and plans to add the plug-in next month.

"Virtual View does in three steps and one console what normally takes us dozens of steps across three management systems," said Ladewig. "We currently have a back-and-forth, time-consuming process to set up storage for new virtual servers. With Virtual View we will be able to do everything within ICON Manager. I expect we will be able to complete storage provisioning tasks in a few minutes rather than the hour or more it currently takes us."

Richard Villars, vice president of Storage Systems at industry analyst firm IDC, raised the challenge of managing storage in a virtual environment in an April 2008 report. According to Villars, "The real challenge of server virtualization for storage administrators isn't managing capacity growth. It is managing the operational burden associated with moves, adds and changes for these virtual servers exacerbated by the phenomena of virtual server sprawl. In extreme cases, storage managers can experience a quadrupling of administrative tasks."

The Virtual View plug-in expands the simplicity of Xiotech's ICON Manager interface, enabling administrators to explore and map all VMware ESX hosts, storage relationships and properties in a unified view. As a result of Virtual View's tight integration with the VMware APIs, it can automate the creation and expansion of virtual disks; logical unit number (LUN) assignments; and datastore creations for ESX systems and clusters -- performing all in three simple steps. Virtual View also helps reduce operational errors and ensures storage is accessible by automatically managing interdependencies across the three different storage layers. A Flash demo of the capabilities of Virtual View is available at http://www.xiotech.com/video/Virtual-View.wmv.

Dallas-based TAC, a Schneider Electric company and a leading provider of building automation solutions, added Xiotech Virtual View earlier this month. With more than 7,500 employees worldwide, and partners and branches in 80 countries, TAC has more than 50 virtual machines supported by a Xiotech storage system. TAC added Xiotech Virtual View to help it more easily provision storage while increasing server utilization.