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Data protection features, such as snapshots and clones, can be applied at a VM-level of granularity by applying them only to the vVols that are related to a specific VM. Also, VASA allows vSphere to communicate with the Dell Unity system to facilitate offloading of these storage-related tasks to the Dell Unity system. Because these tasks are processed by the array, the ESXi host CPU, memory, and network utilization is reduced.
When a snapshot of a VM is initiated using the vSphere Web Client, it is offloaded to the Dell Unity system. Dell Unity storage creates a snapshot of the associated vVols for that particular VM, leaving other VMs on the same datastore unaffected because they are stored on different vVols. After the snapshot is created, a new data vVol is created to store the snapshots contents. The Replica Type is Ready Snap for the snapshot vVol as shown in Figure 27.
The fast clones feature allows you to leverage snapshots to create a clone of a VM, which are offloaded to the Dell Unity system. A common use case where fast clones can be leveraged are VDI environments. Because snapshots are used and a full clone is not required, space efficiency is increased, and clones can be deployed very quickly. These clones are linked to the parent VM, so they must exist on the same storage container as the parent VM. Any changes on the parent VM or the snapshot do not have any effect on each other.
VM full cloning operations are also offloaded to the Dell Unity system. This significantly reduces ESXi host and network utilization because the data does not need to travel from the Dell Unity system to the ESXi host for reading, and then repeated again for writing. The VM storage policy can be selected when creating a clone, which allows for placement of the clone on to a different policy. After the clone is created, it can be managed as an independent VM. Any snapshots on the source VM do not get propagated to the clone. Dell Unity automatically creates a set of vVols for the clone, as shown in Figure 28.
Although Dell Unity storage includes a native VASA 3.0 provider, vVol replication is not supported. If VM-granular replication services are required, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines can be leveraged. RecoverPoint for VMs is a software-only replication solution that provides any-point-in-time asynchronous and synchronous protection on a per-VM basis. It is storage agnostic, working in the hypervisor layer with all storage types supported by VMware, including vVols. For more information about RecoverPoint for VMs, reference the RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines Administrator’s Guide on the Dell Support website.