Administrator Guide

6 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere  Deployment and Configuration Best practices
1.4 Terms and Abbreviations
The following table summarizes terms and abbreviations used in this document:
1.5 Disclaimer
The information contained within this best practices document is intended to provide general recommendations only.
Actual configurations in customer environments may vary due to individual circumstances, budget constraints, service
level agreements, applicable industry-specific regulations, or other factors. Configurations should be tested before
implementing them in a production environment.
Term
Description
Adaptive Load
Balancing (ALB)
MAC address-based mechanism that balances client connections across all available
network interfaces within an FS8600 system.
Network File System
(NFS)
A standard protocol for file and directory sharing over a network.
NFS Datastore
A logical container of Virtual Machine files that represents a remote file system
accessed over NFS.
NFS Datastore Traffic
Refers to the virtual machine file I/O generated by ESX hosts on an NFS Datastore
server. NFS datastore traffic is created by the creation or cloning of virtual machines
as well as guest OS level I/O operations 
NFS Export
A directory shared by an NFS server for remote client access.
Virtual IP (VIP)
An IP address that connects the NAS cluster solution to the client or LAN network.
The VIP address allows clients highly-available access to the NAS solution as a
single entity, thereby providing access to the file system. It enables the FS8600
system solution to perform load balancing between controllers, and ensures that the
service continues even if a controller fails.
Virtual Machine Files
A set of files that store, among others, virtual machine configuration, virtual hard
disk data and snapshots.
Thin clone
Fast and space efficient Virtual machine clone. Compared to a full copy, the thin
cloned VM shares data with the source and only consumes disk space when data is
written to it.
Application and User
Files
Output files created by a client or user in applications on top of the operating system,
such as documents, browser data, media files, and so on.
VMDK
hard disk.
VMFS

VMknic/VMkernel port
A virtual network device in the VMkernel. VMkernel ports are used by the TCP/IP
stack that services Motion, NFS and software iSCSI clients that run at the VMkernel
level, and remote console traffic. In the context of NFS datastore traffic, VMkernel
ports are referred to as interfaces for I/O over NFS.
VMNIC
ESX host physical network interface card.