VMware has expanded its hardware certification program to include virtual storage devices.

The company said it will let storage hardware makers get the green light with VMware Infrastructure to expand their customers choice of vendors.

So far, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM and NetApp have signed on to be certified later this year. You can read them gush on about it in the press release, if you're into that kind of thing.

"VMware Infrastructure leverages and drives significant new adoption of iSCSI and Fibre channel SANs with its native capabilities for distributed volume management, VMware VMotion and rapid application recovery," said Parag Patel, veep of alliances at VMware.

Patel said many customers are looking to implement network-based storage virtualization as their VMware environments grow.

VMware said it worked with its storage ecosystem partners to extend virtual storage services to its environments, including collaboration to integrate products such as VMware Site Recover Manager with third-party LUN-based replication.®

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