External storage
Although each VxRail Appliance includes its own on-board storage resources, you can also use your
appliance with external EMC storage. Your VxRail Appliance supports NFS datastores and VMFS
datastores over iSCSI.
NFS and VMFS over iSCSI datastores
Your VxRail Appliance can be used with external EMC storage with NFS datastores or VMFS over iSCSI
datastores.
You may want to consider using external storage for workloads with high storage capacity requirements
relative to the amount of required compute resources (CPU cores and RAM). External datastores allow
you to scale VxRail Appliance compute resources separately from storage capacity. This can improved
overall hardware usage levels. As a result it may be more cost-effective to use an external storage array
such as Unity, VNX, or Isilon to provide additional storage for your VxRail Appliance cluster.
Note that external storage arrays must be managed separately. You cannot use the automated workflows
in VxRail Manager for vSphere storage configuration and management with external datastores. Instead,
you must use the vSphere Web Client to configure NFS and iSCSI on the ESXi hosts in the VxRail
Appliance cluster, and to create NFS datastores and VMFS datastores over iSCSI on external arrays in
the vCenter Server Appliance instance in the VxRail Appliance cluster. You must also use provisioning
virtual machines on these external datastores in vCenter using the vSphere Web Client.
Refer to VMware vSphere documentation for details about using NFS and iSCSI storage with ESXi:
•
Understanding Network File System Datastores
•
About the Software iSCSI Adapter
Setting up external NFS storage for a VxRail Appliance
Follow these guidelines to set up your VxRail Appliance for use with an NFS datastore.
Before you begin
Many storage products provide NFS services, including EMC UNity, VNX, Isilon, and CloudArray. These
guidelines assume that you have already installed and provisioned your VxRail Appliance cluster as well
as your external NFS storage server.
About this task
The NFS datastore is created directly from vCenter on your VxRail Appliance cluster. A VLAN and a
vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) are used.
Refer to the VMware vSphere documentation,
Set Up NFS Storage Environment
storage with ESXi.
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Appliance 3.5 Product Guide
External storage
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