VMware VAIO stands for “vSphere APIs for IO Filtering”. It’s a new API framework technology present in vSphere 6.0 (6.0 U1 more precisely) allowing vendors to present capabilities for caching and replication to individual VMs. It’s a framework, not feature. VAIO can be used not only caching but also for replication. Infinio is one of the first (or even the first one AFAIK) vendors actually building a new product that uses this technology.
From the VAIO developers page here we can learn that it’s a policy-driven solution. The data services are surfaced through storage policy based management control plane (like for VSAN or VVOLs for example) and allow to govern per-VM or per-vmdk granularity on those services.
Infinio provides the fastest and the most secure way to intercept I/O coming from a VM. An I/O filter installed on all ESXi hosts, then related storage policy is applied to each VM that will be accelerated.
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