What is the VMware file system (VMFS), and what advantages does it provide over the use of traditional file systems?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

VMware uses a file system called VMFS to format and manage data stores on both local and shared SAN storage including Fibre Channel and iSCSI. VMFS is a high performance clustered file system designed to maximize support of virtual machines and provide virtualization features such as the ability to dynamically increase data store capacity while virtual machines are running, use sub-lock addressing to make efficient use of storage for small files, and provide for virtual disk files up to 2 TB in size. In addition to being efficient and scalable, VMFS is the foundation for VMware's distributed infrastructure services. Allowing multiple hosts to simultaneously read and write to shared networked storage devices enables virtualization features such as clustering of virtual machines across different servers, migration of running virtual machines from one host to another without down time, and automatic restarting of failed virtual machines on a separate host.