To work with Virtual Volumes, you must make sure that your storage and vSphere environment are set up correctly.
Prepare Storage System for Virtual Volumes
To prepare your storage system environment for Virtual Volumes, follow these guidelines. For additional information, contact your storage vendor.
- The storage system or storage array that you use must support Virtual Volumes and integrate with the vSphere components through vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA). The storage array must support thin provisioning and snapshotting.
- The Virtual Volumes storage provider must be deployed.
- The following components must be configured on the storage side:
- Protocol endpoints
- Storage containers
- Storage profiles
- Replication configurations if you plan to use Virtual Volumes with replication. See Requirements for Replication with Virtual Volumes.
Prepare vSphere Environment
- Make sure to follow appropriate setup guidelines for the type of storage you use, Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, or NFS. If necessary, install and configure storage adapters on your ESXi hosts.
- If you use iSCSI, activate the software iSCSI adapters on your ESXi hosts. Configure Dynamic Discovery and enter the IP address of your Virtual Volumes storage system. See Configure the Software iSCSI Adapter.
- Synchronize all components in the storage array with vCenter Server and all ESXi hosts. Use Network Time Protocol (NTP) to do this synchronization.
For more information, contact your vendor and see VMware Compatibility Guide
