Is Data Storage The Hidden Cause of Your VMware Challenges?
Ryan Keogh
Slow data access??? Complex data management???? Costly refresh cycles??? Pure Storage transforms storage with speed, simplicity, and scalability.
Today’s virtualisation landscape has forced many IT professionals to reevaluate their VM environments, whether it’s to stay put for now or weigh other options. It’s bringing key pain points to the forefront—rising costs, sluggish performance, and rigid architectures—calling into question things like licensing, hypervisor decisions, and compute resources.?
But what if addressing those alone only treats the symptoms, not the cause? What if the opportunity to improve VM environments for what’s next is somewhere else—like data storage infrastructure?
Too often, data storage is overlooked for the critical role it plays in flexibility, performance, and long-term adaptability of VM environments—until it becomes a bottleneck. Let’s look at how your current data storage may be making these common VM problems worse:?
1. Inflexibility When Considering Cloud or New Hypervisors
Symptom: “We want to explore cloud or alternative hypervisors, but the storage options from our HCI vendor have us locked in, making migration too complex and risky.”
Root Cause: Proprietary storage technologies, such as vSAN and VMFS (VMware File System), are not directly compatible with other hypervisors. This creates silos of storage that cannot be easily shared or migrated between different virtualisation platforms. For example, legacy SAN/NAS architectures reliant on vendor-specific SCSI extensions or non-standardised NFSv3 implementations create hypervisor lock-in. Add to that the fact that storage systems lacking RESTful API integration force manual LUN provisioning, and hypervisor transitions can get complicated.?
As organisations navigate the complexities of multi-hypervisor environments, the need for a unified storage solution becomes increasingly apparent. Modern solutions using NVMe-oF/TCP, for example, enable cross-platform workload mobility, while Ansible/Terraform-ready platforms enable declarative storage provisioning across heterogeneous environments.?
2. Slow VM Performance and Unpredictable Latency
Symptom: “My VMs randomly slow down, even though CPU and RAM usage looks fine.”
Root Cause: When virtualization performance lags, IT teams frequently look at CPU and RAM limitations, assuming they need to add more physical hosts. However, in many cases, those resources are stuck waiting on slow storage subsystems to execute on the backend.
Legacy storage systems—especially spinning disk arrays or outdated hybrid arrays—can’t keep up with modern virtualisation demands. Spinning disk arrays that deliver <200 IOPS with 10ms+ latency versus all-flash systems offering 100K+ IOPS at sub-1ms latency create bottlenecks at the data layer, throttling performance.
3. Constantly Running Out of Capacity
Symptom: “We’re always scrambling for more storage space, and adding capacity is expensive and disruptive.”
Root Cause: Some IT teams try to address performance and capacity issues by spinning up more VMs or increasing allocated resources per VM, leading to inefficiencies. They may not realise that their underlying storage system lacks proper deduplication, compression, or intelligent workload balancing, which could optimise their existing infrastructure instead of just adding more resources.?
Older storage lacks efficient data reduction (like inline deduplication and compression) and dynamic scalability, leading to wasted space. (Modern inline dedupe with variable 4KB-128KB block sizing achieves 5:1+ reduction ratios for VM workloads versus fixed 512B block dedupe in legacy systems that yield <2:1 efficiency.) Without seamless scalability, adding capacity requires forklift upgrades and complex migrations, or you end up overprovisioning storage to compensate, driving up costs.
4. Complex and Time-consuming Management
Symptom: “Manually managing storage for our VMs takes too much time, and we’re constantly tuning settings.”
Root Cause: Traditional storage lacks deep integration with VMware, leading to manual tuning, storage vMotions, and frequent troubleshooting. Lack of vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA) 3.0 support prevents automated VM storage policy compliance. Also, missing Prometheus/Grafana integration limits correlation of storage metrics with vCenter performance charts for root cause analysis.
A unified storage platform supporting vVols with per-VM IOPS limits and failover priorities reduces manual intervention and automates these processes to free up IT resources (e.g., integration with vSphere for simpler, smarter management). Plus, a unified storage provides a single point of management and administration, freeing IT teams from juggling multiple tools and disparate storage pools for more efficient resource allocation and reduces the risk of errors.
5. Long Backup and Recovery Times
Symptom: “Our VM backups and restores take forever, making disaster recovery a nightmare.”
Root Cause: Legacy storage systems rely on slow snapshot mechanisms and outdated backup tools, making recovery inefficient. Modern solutions, on the other hand, offer near-instant snapshots and rapid VM restores to minimise downtime. Array-based snapshots reduce RTO from hours to minutes by avoiding network-bound backup architectures, which are critical for VM-centric SLAs.
6. Rising Costs
Symptom: “VMware costs are skyrocketing, and we’re struggling to keep our budget in check.”
Root Cause: Many IT teams assume that VMware’s increasing costs are solely due to licensing changes or vendor pricing shifts. However, inefficient storage infrastructure can drive up total costs far more than expected. Legacy storage architectures force organisations to overprovision capacity, leading to wasted storage space and unnecessary hardware purchases.
All-flash systems with 7:1 data reduction can lower $/IOPS compared to legacy hybrid arrays, while cutting power/cooling costs by 80% versus HDD systems.
Pure Storage: The Foundation for a Resilient Virtualisation Strategy
It’s time to ask: Is my storage infrastructure making my virtualisation problems worse? And more importantly—can modern storage make them better?
Forward-thinking IT leaders have discovered that storage can either enable what’s next—even if that means staying put—or exacerbate challenges. Optimising storage environments is their incremental first step, and with good reason: Your storage infrastructure is a foundational piece of your virtualisation strategy, not just a background component.?
The right storage platform can help you:
Control What You Can Control
Control what you can control. While VMware’s licensing changes and industry shifts may be outside of your control, optimising your storage is a proactive step to address issues in your environment, reduce costs, and open up future possibilities.
Join Our Webinar
Learn more about how to build an architecture that supports your organisation’s virtualisation needs.
Written By: Carey Wodehouse