virtual storage appliance (VSA)
A virtual storage appliance (VSA) is a storage controller that runs on a virtual
machine (VM) to
create shared storage without the cost of additional hardware.
A VSA can make use of all the unused storage within a virtual environment by acting as a data
store for virtual machine storage or by presenting storage directly to the VMs for their use.
Basically, the virtual storage appliance consolidates direct-attached capacity on each physical
host and creates a virtual storage
pool that looks like networked storage. VSAs are popular with small businesses that need shared
storage for redundancy and high
availability (HA), as well as with
large enterprises that need to migrate data between disparate arrays.
See also: virtual
SAN appliance, cloud storage
appliance.
Contributor(s): Julia Anderson
This was last updated in November 2012
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