Administrator Guide
8 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere Deployment and Configuration Best practices
3 Solution Overview
3.1 Benefits
Using standard network infrastructure, FS8600 offers a scalable, flexible and highly available storage solution for
vSphere. The key advantages of the solution are:
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3.2 Architecture
From the bottom up, the first building block of an FS8600 NFS storage solution for vSphere is the storage array. As an
administrator, you just need to tell the Dell Storage Manager what is the initial size of your NAS LUN Space, which is
the storage capacity that you want to allocate to the solution. The Dell storage manager automatically performs an
optimized configuration of the LUNs and the FS8600 appliance formats them with the Fluid File System (FluidFS). This
process results in the presentation of a NAS pool, which is the net space available for file level storage. The size of the
NAS LUN space can be increased non-disruptively when your storage demands grow.
The NAS pool in FluidFS is managed using elastic virtual storage containers called NAS volumes. You can create,
delete, shrink or expand NAS volumes in an instant because all their provisioning processes are based exclusively on
metadata operations. Since NFS datastores in FluidFS reside in NAS volumes, they inherit the NAS volume elasticity
properties. This means you can modify the size of datastores without any impact to its virtual machines or the ESX hosts
mounting them. Furthermore, scaling the environment with more datastores or hosts is easy because there are no
discovery procedures involved.