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11 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere Deployment and Configuration Best practices
4 Network Infrastructure and Configuration
This section describes various considerations and recommendations related to the physical network infrastructure as well
as its logical configuration.
4.1 Managing Client Files and Datastores in a Single File System
The FS8600 in a vSphere environment can act as an NFS datastore server for virtual machine files and at the same time
as a file server for application and user files. Storing client files outside virtual machine hard drives and directly in the
FS8600 is the best way to leverage the FS8600 native file-level features on application and user data. This methodology
has several benefits:
• Seamless differentiation and separate management of guest operating system data and application and user data.
• Faster and more flexible application and user data recovery from corruption and loss using snapshots.
• Increased efficiency of application and user data replication.
• Accessibility of application and user data is independent of the virtual machine.
Dell recommends logically separating virtual machine files from application and user data in different NAS volumes to
consistently implement the aforementioned benefits. Achieve this by creating a set of NAS volumes, one for each
datastore, and a different set of volumes with their corresponding CIFS shares and/or NFS exports for client files.
Figure 1 Network Schema
In addition, for better security and management, Dell recommends segmenting the network paths physically and
logically. Assign separate physical NIC teams for each path and split the traffic logically into VLANs. See Figure 1 for
reference.
minimize the number of hops on the NFS datastore network. Routing between ESX host
NFS datastore traffic links and the FS8600 client ports should be avoided. VLANs and subnets can and should be used to
logically separate workloads and load-share the network throughput as long as the links between the ESX hosts and the
FS8600 reside in the same broadcast domain.