STORCENTER
AUDIENCE
Information contained in this white paper is intended for Iomega customers, partners, and service personnel involved in planning, architecting, or administering a VMware environment with an Iomega StorCenter NAS as the storage device. The readers are expected to have experience with ESX Server and an Iomega StorCenter NAS devices that run EMC Lifeline software.
TERMINOLOGY
t Datastore: A file system, either VMFS or NFS, that serves as a virtual representation of an underlying pool of physical storage resources. These physical storage resources can be comprised of SCSI disks from a local server, Fibre Channel SAN disk arrays, iSCSI SAN disk arrays, or NAS storage arrays.
t Internet SCSI (iSCSI): A protocol for sending SCSI packets over TCP/IP networks.
t iSCSI LUN: iSCSI LUN (Logical Unit Number) is a virtual disk that processes SCSI commands, such as reading from and writing to storage media.
t Network File System (NFS): A distributed file system providing transparent access to remote file systems. NFS allows all network systems to share a single copy of a directory.
t Raw Device Mapping (RDM): RDM includes a combination of a pointer, which is a .vmdk file that resides on a VMFS volume, and a physical raw device that the .vmdk file points to. RDM can either be physical compatibility mode or virtual compatibility mode.
t Virtual Machine: A virtualized x86 PC on which a guest operating system and an associated application run. A VM is also a set of discrete files that primarily include a .vmx configuration file and one or more .vmdk virtual disk files.
t Virtual Machine File System (VMFS): A VMware proprietary file system installed onto data stores and used by ESX Server to house virtual machines.
SOLUTION CONFIGURATION
This section lists hardware and software resources for provisioning StorCenter
HARDWARE
Table 1 lists the hardware resources used in the testing environment for the paper
Hardware | Quantity | Configuration | |
Iomega® StorCenter™ Pro | one | •Four 500 GB or 1TB (7200 rpm) SATA disks | |
NAS |
| •RAID 5 across the disks | |
|
| •One GbE network connection | |
Dell PowerEdge 1850 | one | •Two Intel Xeon 3.00GHz CPUs | |
|
| •8 GB of memory | |
|
| •One 146 GB 15k internal SCSI disk | |
|
| •Four 10/100/1000 MB Ethernet NICs | |
|
|
|
White Paper | 3 |