Management: VMware vCenter Plugin

July 14, 2024

Ivan Ischenko

StarWind Pre-Sales Team Lead. Ivan has a deep knowledge of virtualization, strong background in storage technologies, and solution architecture.

VMware vCenter integration provides seamless management and unified control of storage and virtual machines.

Intro:

The Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) not only means a software-defined storage, networking and compute but also includes a single management tool to manage all of these components. Without centralized management, any Hyperconverged cluster cannot be considered as true HCI.

Problem:

Companies will often try to cut costs by using third-party storage solutions for VMware clusters. This, in turn, results in administrators having to use the separate management for storage and vSphere Web Client for VMs. Switching between multiple tabs/consoles complicates the management of whole cluster.

For example, to create and configure storage pools, virtual disks, and network shares within a VMware environment, administrators would usually have to switch between the third-party web UI and vSphere Web Client to manually create VMFS and NFS datastores on top of the third-party SDS iSCSI LUNs and NFS3/4.1 shares from vSphere Web Client.

Solution:

In order to provide VMware ecosystem administrators with a seamless user experience when working with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), we designed a vCenter Plugin. It unlocks the ability to configure and monitor your StarWind Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) from the web UI you already have and are used to, which is VMware vCenter.

StarWind vCenter Plugin allows managing StarWind-based infrastructure from the single window of vCenter. The plugin can be installed once StarWind VSAN is deployed. After the plugin is installed and registered with vCenter Server, it integrates StarWind VSAN web UI into vCenter. You’ll be able to manage and monitor your current storage configuration and modify its settings without having to split these tasks among several tools.

Conclusion:

StarWind is synonymous with elevated user experience that is achieved through simplified daily administration routine and minimized resources utilization. Our vCenter Plugin extends the StarWind VSAN functionality by allowing you to manage and monitor your StarWind-based clusters, including the creation of VMFS.