In this next series of blog articles, I am going to take a look at VMware’s Pluggable Storage Architecture, more commonly referred to as the PSA. The PSA was first introduced with ESX 4.0 and can be thought of as a set of APIs that allows third-party code to be inserted directly into the storage I/O path. Why would VMware want to allow this? The reason is straight forward. This allows 3rd party software developers (typically storage hardware vendors) to design their own load balancing techniques and fail-over mechanisms for their own storage arrays. It also means that 3rd party…