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Capability profile: Used to advertise the available characteristics of a storage pool as part of Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM).
Fibre Channel (FC) protocol: Transfer protocol used to communicate IP and SCSI commands over an 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 on a network.
Protocol endpoint: An NFS mount point or proxy LUN that is used as an I/O 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 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 VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVol) datastore in Dell Unity storage.
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 is used to manage Dell Unity systems.
vCenter: VMware vCenter server that provides a centralized platform for managing VMware vSphere environments.
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.
VMware vSphere 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-level of granularity and according to SPBM. Virtual Volumes can also refer to the individual storage objects that are used to enable this functionality.
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.