White Papers

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This technical report is aimed at VMware™ and Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series
SAN administrators to guide them on the use of the Dell Virtual Storage
Manager v3.5 to create and coordinate hypervisor-aware snapshots for data
protection and recovery. Throughout this technical report, examples will be
given for setting up and configuring snapshots and schedules as well as
instructions on data recovery and other advanced options.
INTRODUCTION
In today’s datacenter, customers are utilizing VMware™ virtualization solutions
and Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series SAN storage to consolidate servers and
storage for better utilization, efficiency and ease of management. The
encapsulation of the virtual machine (VM) into a set of files not only increases
the flexibility of data protection but also raises the challenge of managing the
protection of all these virtualized assets. VMware provides a snapshot
technology within vCenter that can quiesce and help protect these mission
critical VMs. Dell has combined the intelligence of native point in time PS Series
SAN snapshots with the hypervisor snapshots offered by VMware to provide a
scalable and automated data protection package for the virtual environment.
This automated coordination is referred to as a SmartCopy.
The Dell Virtual Storage Manager v3.5 (VSM) is the next generation of VMware
vCenter plug-ins that allows administrators to coordinate data protection and
recovery within their VMware vSphere virtual environment. The Dell VSM is a
virtual appliance that is downloaded as part of the all-inclusive Dell EqualLogic
software support and can be installed into an existing VMware vCenter
environment. VSM contains many features and abilities that help VMware
administrators gain better control and functionality over their EqualLogic
environment including:
Datastore Manager - a feature to provision, expand, delete and monitor
EqualLogic Datastores
VSM Smart Copies and Replication - formerly known as Auto-Snapshot
Manager/VMware which allows the creation of hypervisor consistent
snapshots, clones and replicas for data protection and disaster recovery
VDI Tool - a feature which coordinates SAN based thin clones to
provision space efficient virtual desktops within a VMware View
environment
Dell EqualLogic VASA Provider - a set of API calls that allow vCenter and
the EqualLogic SAN to communicate for better storage awareness
This technical report will focus on VSM Smart Copies for local data protection
and recovery. This is done by first coordinating with vCenter to place virtual
machines into VMware snapshot mode, then coordinating with the SAN to take