Administrator Guide

9 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere  Deployment and Configuration Best practices
Figure 1 FS8600 storage solution building blocks for vSphere
Data stored in the NAS pool is evenly distributed by FluidFS among all the underlying LUNs regardless of the number
of datastores. There is no need to worry about balancing space between physical volumes when performing capacity
management operations.
NAS volumes in FluidFS are also administrative domains. All data stored within a NAS volume is subject to common
data protection, data reduction, accessibility and security policies. Since NAS volumes have their own folder hierarchy it
is possible to create more than one datastore in a single NAS volume. This is particularly useful to categorize virtual
machines in vSphere, while keeping them under the same storage management policies.
Virtual machines provisioning becomes fast and efficient using FluidFS file cloning technologies. FluidFS can create
numerous amount of clones in an instant out of source virtual machines or templates. These are functional copies of
virtual machines that share data with their source, so they can be created instantly and save significant amounts of disk
space.
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NAS functions and features. It can simultaneously act as the storage platform to stora and manage unstructured data
generated by both virtual and physical machine clients. You can create as many NAS volumes as needed for user and
application files and share their folders using SMB or NFS. This is the ultimate way to optimize the solution and
leverage all FluidFS native file-level features.
Error! Reference source not found. shows a sample solution design scheme for environments where source templates
are cloned to provision large amounts of virtual clients. Assuming that all source templates can reside under the same