Dell AX4-5 Specifications download pdf (Page 25)

EMC CLARiiON Integration with

VMware ESX Server

Applied Technology 25

Figure 16. Partitioning a CLARiiON LUN

Raw Disk

.vmdk file

ESX Service

Console

Level

M 1- 5 GB

M 2- 4 GB

Virtualization

Open ()

Read (),

Write ()

Raw Disk

MFS Partition

–

10 GB

.vmdk 4G

.vmdk 5G

Virtual Machine

Level

Raw Disk

irtual Disks Raw Device Ma

(

RDM

)

Raw disks

For raw disks, an entire CLARiiON LUN is presented to a single virtual machine without being partitioned

at the ESX service console level. When a virtual machine is configured to use a raw disk, VMware directly

accesses the local disk/partition as a raw device. Raw devices are available in ESX 2.5, but it is

recommended that the LUN be configured as a raw device mapping device (RDM) instead. RDMs are very

similar to raw disks except that RDMs are compatible with VMotion.

VMFS volumes

When a CLARiiON LUN is configured as a VMFS volume, this volume can be partitioned and presented

to a number of virtual machines. For example, if you present a 10 GB CLARiiON LUN to your ESX

server, a VMFS file system can be created on that LUN. New VMFS-3 volumes created with 3.5/ESXi

must be 1,200 MB or larger. For previous versions of ESX Server, the VMFS-3 requirement was 600 MB.

The user has the option of presenting this entire VMFS volume to an individual virtual machine or

presenting portions of this volume to a number of virtual machines. In

Figure 16, the VMFS volume is used

to create two virtual disks (.vmdk files)—one is 5 GB and the other is 4 GB. Each of these virtual disks is

presented to a different virtual machine. It is also possible to create a virtual disk on an entire VMFS

volume and assign this virtual disk to a single virtual machine.

In ESX 4.0/3.x/ESXi, the swap files, NVRAM files, and configuration (.vmx) files for a virtual machine

reside on a VMFS-3 volume. On ESX 2.0, these files reside on an ext3 file system on the service console.

ESX 2.x supports an undoable disk mode that allows you to keep or discard changes to a virtual disk using

snapshot technology. Snapshot technology on the ESX server is supported for VMFS-3 and VMFS-2

volumes. In ESX 4.0/3.x/ESXi, the snapshot technology allows all virtual disks within a VM configured as

VMFS-3 volumes to be snapshot together along with VM memory, processor, and other states using the

consolidated backup solution.

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Dell AX4-5 Specifications Page 25

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