What is the purpose of a storage VM?

The purpose of a storage Virtual Machine (storage VM) is fundamentally to serve data to clients. Storage VMs provide a virtualization layer that abstracts the underlying physical storage resources. This allows for the management and organization of storage in an efficient manner that can cater to specific workloads while also simplifying data access for various clients.

By enabling the serving of data to clients, a storage VM facilitates protocols such as NFS, CIFS, or iSCSI. This is crucial for environments in which diverse applications and users require access to shared data while ensuring efficiency, security, and proper resource allocation.

While other options like defining physical properties of the cluster, hosting applications and services, and managing user access have important roles within the storage framework, they do not capture the primary function of a storage VM. Instead, the main focus remains on how these VMs optimize data serving capabilities to meet client needs effectively, which underscores their significance in data storage architecture.