Virtual storage appliance gateway

One or more non-transitory machine-readable storage media having program code for operating a storage server system stored therein, the program code comprising instructions to:

• establish a network connection between a virtual storage appliance (VSA) in a virtual machine and the storage server system, wherein the virtual machine runs on a computing device remote to the storage server system, wherein the virtual machine isolates operations of the VSA from other processing activities on the computing device and implements the VSA in an operating system that is different from an operating system of the computing device;
• provide access to a second shared namespace of data at the VSA over the network connection, wherein the second shared namespace is a policy defined subset of a first shared namespace of the storage server system, wherein data in the second shared namespace is accessible at the storage server system by at least one other computing device communicatively coupled to the storage server system, wherein the data in the second shared namespace at the VSA is replicated to create a local copy at the computing device;
• and
• synchronize changes to the local copy with the data in the second shared namespace at the storage server system.

An apparatus comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a machine-readable medium having program code executable by the processor to cause the apparatus to,
• establish a network connection between a virtual storage appliance (VSA) in a virtual machine and a storage server system, wherein the virtual machine runs on a computing device remote to the storage server system, wherein the virtual machine isolates operations of the VSA from other processing activities on the computing device and implements the VSA in an operating system that is different from an operating system of the computing device;
• provide access to a second shared namespace of data at the VSA over the network connection, wherein the second shared namespace is a policy defined subset of a first shared namespace of the storage server system, wherein data in the second shared namespace is accessible at the storage server system by at least one other computing device communicatively coupled to the storage server system, wherein the data in the second shared namespace at the VSA is replicated to create a local copy at the computing device, wherein the data in the second shared namespace comprises a smaller subset of data in the first shared namespace;
• and
• synchronize changes to the local copy with the data in the second shared namespace at the storage server system.