Administrator Guide
21 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere Deployment and Configuration Best practices
3. On each export, grant read and write access the ESX hosts IP addresses.
4. Mark the NAS volume as VMware application aware
It is an FS8600 best practice to group virtual machines with common management policies in the same datastores.
7.4 Provisioning Virtual Machines
Dell recommends cloning virtual machines using the vSphere Web Client plugin. The plugin is designed to create
multiple copies of VMs at once whether as full copies or as space efficient thin clones. For more information and tutorial
Additional Resources5.
While vSphere has its own cloning methodologies to provision virtual machines out of templates, vCenter cloning
operations offloaded to the FS8600 via VAAI results in the creation of a full copy of the source VM. Dell recommends
cloning virtual machines using the vSphere Web Client plugin. The plugin leverages the FS8600 file level cloning
features, allowing fast and space efficient virtual machine cloning.
7.5 Taking Datastore Snapshots
Datastores snapshots in the FS8600 constitute a basis for data protection, replication and cloning. Datastore snapshots
are essentially NAS volume snapshots taken after attempting to bring live virtual machines residing on them to a
quiescent state. The FS8600 asks vCenter to take a snapshot of the live VMs after quiescing their guest OS, and upon
vCenter acknowledge it takes a snapshot of the NAS volume. This behavior is triggered in NAS volumes with
set and requires that you provide the FS8600 with vCenter server connection information. Dell
stores live VMs.
7.6 Cloning Datastores
The built-in thin cloning feature of the FS8600 is a time- and space-efficient way to create a replica of a NAS volume.
NAS volume clones are essentially writable snapshots created by means of metadata operations. The result of volume
cloning is a new set of pointers to parent data blocks, making the space costs of volume cloning negligible. From the
moment a volume is cloned, new data written either to the base or the cloned volume will be exclusively owned and
referenced by it, while they continue to share their common data blocks.