EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Virtualization offers many benefits such as consolidation, performance, availability, business continuity, load balancing, and ease of
maintenance. Because of these advantages, it’s easy to see why more and more applications are being virtualized today. It is
important for datacenter components to not only support, but also provide integration with hypervisors and virtualized applications.
AUDIENCE
This white paper is intended for storage or virtualization architects, administrators, partners, EMC employees and any other users
involved in evaluating, acquiring, managing, operating, or designing a virtualized environment using EMC Unity or UnityVSA.
TERMINOLOGY
Capability Profile - Used to advertise the available characteristics of a storage pool as part of Storage Policy Based Management
(SPBM).
Fibre Channel Protocol – Transfer protocol used to communicate Internet Protocol (IP) and Small Computer Systems Interface
(SCSI) commands over a Fibre Channel (FC) network.
Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) – Provides a mechanism for accessing block-level data storage over network
connections.
Network File System (NFS) – A file access protocol that allows data access typically from Linux/UNIX hosts located on a network.
Protocol Endpoint - An NFS mount point or proxy LUN that is used as an IO access point from the ESXi host to the storage system.
Server Message Block (SMB) – A file access protocol that allows data access typically from Windows hosts located on a network.
Storage Container - A VMware term for a logical entity that consists of one or more Capability Profiles and their storage limits. This
is known as a VVol datastore in Unity.
Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) - Using storage policies to dictate where a VM will be stored, as opposed to choosing
a datastore manually.
Unisphere - An HTML5 graphical user interface that’s used to manage EMC Unity systems.
Virtual Machine - An operating system running on a hypervisor, which is used to emulate physical hardware.
Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) - A software-defined storage solution that enables a storage software stack to be deployed as a
Virtual Machine.
VM Storage Policy - A rule set that defines the desired attributes of a datastore. When a compatible datastore is selected, this is
used for VM placement, migration, and monitoring.
vSphere API for Array Integration (VAAI) - A VMware API that improves ESXi host utilization by offloading storage-related tasks
to the storage system.
vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA) - A VMware vendor neutral API that enables vSphere to determine the capabilities
of a storage system. This requires a VASA Provider on the storage system for communication.
Virtual Volumes (VVols) - A VMware storage framework which allows VM data to be stored on individual Virtual Volumes. This
allows for data services to be applied at a VM-granularity and SPBM. Virtual Volumes can also refer to the individual storage objects
that are used to enable this functionality.
