Administrator Guide

3 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere  Deployment and Configuration Best practices
Table of contents
Revisions .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
1 Preface ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.1 Audience ............................................................................................................................................................................. 5
1.2 Purpose ............................................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.3 Additional Resources.......................................................................................................................................................... 5
1.4 Terms and Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................................... 6
1.5 Disclaimer .......................................................................................................................................................................... 6
2 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
3 Solution Overview ........................................................................................................................................................................ 8
3.1 Benefits ............................................................................................................................................................................... 8
3.2 Architecture ........................................................................................................................................................................ 8
3.3 Fluid File System Overview ............................................................................................................................................. 10
4 Network Infrastructure and Configuration .................................................................................................................................. 11
4.1 Managing Client Files and Datastores in a Single File System ........................................................................................ 11
4.2 Switch Topology .............................................................................................................................................................. 12
4.3 ESX Host NICs for Datastore Traffic ............................................................................................................................... 12
4.4 FS8600 Client Network Configuration ............................................................................................................................. 13
5 NFS Datastore Traffic Load Sharing ........................................................................................................................................... 14
5.1 Subnet-Based Load Sharing ............................................................................................................................................. 14
5.2 Load Balancing Between FS8600 Controllers ................................................................................................................. 15
6 Virtual Network Configuration ................................................................................................................................................... 17
6.1 NFS Datastore Traffic Configuration ............................................................................................................................... 17
6.2 Virtual Machine Traffic Configuration ............................................................................................................................ 18
7 Datastores Configuration............................................................................................................................................................. 19
7.1 Determining the Number of Datastores in the Environment ............................................................................................ 19
7.2 Increasing the Maximum Number of NFS Datastores per ESX Host ............................................................................... 19
7.3 Configuring NFS Datastores ............................................................................................................................................ 20
7.3.1 Manual Creation of NFS Datastores ................................................................................................................................. 20
7.4 Provisioning Virtual Machines ......................................................................................................................................... 21
7.5 Taking Datastore Snapshots ............................................................................................................................................. 21
7.6 Cloning Datastores ........................................................................................................................................................... 21
7.7 Migrating Datastores/Virtual Machines to the FS8600 .................................................................................................... 22