With the announcement of vSphere 6.0, VMware also officially released support for the vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVOL) architecture. VVOL allows more efficient operations and control of external storage resources, such as the IBM® XIV® storage system.

This IBM Redpaper publication provides a short overview of the VVOL architecture implementation in XIV. The integration of VVOL with XIV is based on the VMware APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA). The IBM support for VASA is delivered as part of IBM Spectrum Control.

This paper discusses the prerequisites and shows a step-by-step illustration on how to practically set up XIV to support and use vSphere Virtual Volumes.