Before You Enable vSphere Virtual Volumes

To work with vSphere Virtual Volumes, ensure 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. Except NVMe.

  • Storage containers

  • Storage profiles

  • Replication configurations if you plan to use Virtual Volumes with replication. See Requirements for Replication with Virtual Volumes.

• If you use NVMe, create NVM subsystems and associate Virtual Volumes Host NQNs with relevant NVM subsystems. This configuration step depends on partner specific NVMe design. For more information, contact your array vendor.

Prepare vSphere Environment

• Ensure to follow appropriate setup guidelines for the type of storage you use, NVMe over Fibre Channel, NVMe over TCP, 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 with ESXi.

  • If you use NVMe, follow the requirements for NVMe over Fibre Channel and NVMe over TCP. See Requirements for VMware NVMe Storage.

• 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

Synchronize vSphere Storage Environment with a Network Time Server

If you use Virtual Volumes, configure Network Time Protocol (NTP) to make sure all ESXi hosts on the vSphere network are synchronized.

Procedure

1. In the vSphere Client, navigate to the ESXi host.
2. Click the Configure tab.
3. Under System, select Time Configuration.
4. Click Edit and set up the NTP server.
   1. Select Use Network Time Protocol (Enable NTP client).
   2. Set the NTP Service Startup Policy.
   3. Enter the IP addresses of the NTP server to synchronize with.
   4. Click Start or Restart in the NTP Service Status section.
5. Click OK.
   The host synchronizes with the NTP server.