Back last summer, Virsto announced the beta support of vSphere for what it is now calling its storage hypervisor. That has now been released, along with a second version of its HyperV product. Both Virsto products automatically thin provision your storage repositories, and also make your storage vastly scalable and easier to replicate, backup and clone.
This is no small accomplishment, and can have big implications. One of their customers has saved a million dollars per year using their software. That is because virtual storage pools often waste a lot of the room in the process. What is impressive about both products is how carefully the Virsto engineers have adopted the native management frameworks: The vSphere version integrates into the vCenter management console and comes with rapid provisioning wizards to make setup easier. And the HyperV version integrates into the Microsoft Management Console interface. V2 for HyperV has an updated user interface, supports storage tiers, and has a utility that makes it easier to recover a snapshot of the entire Virsto environment for disaster recovery purposes. It also includes better integration with Veeam’s VDI product line.
Both make it easier to clone VMs, taking minutes rather than hour with competing products. Above is a screencapture showing the VDI deployment utility. In tests using IOmeter, Virsto’s storage delivered nearly a 10x performance improvement in terms of I/O response time. Pricing starts at $15,000 per terabyte managed.
