Release Notes

68 Dell Virtual Storage Manager: Installation Considerations and Local Data Protection | 2079-BP-V-VSM
C Virtual Volumes terminology
While reading this paper, it is important to have an understanding of the following vVols-relevant terminology.
VASA Provider: The VASA Provider plays an important role in enabling a vVol environment. The VASA Provider offers
out-of-band management access to the SAN from vCenter. It enables vCenter to communicate with the SAN in ways
that the current SCSI protocol does not. Through this communication channel, vCenter sends operational requests for
interacting with the Virtual Volumes that back Virtual-Volume-based virtual machines.
The Dell VASA Provider ships as part of the Virtual Storage Manager plugin for vCenter, which also provides enhanced
storage management functionality to vCenter.
Figure 13 VASA Provider status as shown in vSphere Web Client
Protocol endpoint: The protocol endpoint is a unique volume on the SAN, it has a size of zero megabytes and a LUN ID
of 256.
It is the SAN endpoint of the communication between the ESXi host and the Virtual Volumes on the SAN. The transport
protocol (iSCSI in the case of PS Series) endpoint is where the communication is turned over to internal SAN protocols.
This unique volume can be thought of as a multiplexer LUN that acts as both the target and the initiator, and enables
ESXi hosts to see a single volume while multiple independent volumes fan out behind it in the SAN. These multiple
independent volumes are included in a virtual machine.
The protocol endpoint is also where access controls are placed and initiators are queried to insure that they are
permitted access to the storage container and Virtual Volumes. VSM manages these access controls directly from
vCenter.