Home > Storage > Unity XT > Virtualization, Cloud & Applications > Dell Unity: Virtualization Integration > vVol datastores
vVols can only be stored on vVol datastores; they cannot be stored on traditional NFS or VMFS datastores. In VMware terms, vVol datastores on Dell Unity systems are also known as storage containers. Dell Unity storage supports both block and file vVol datastores for access using iSCSI/Fibre Channel or NFS, respectively. When creating a vVol datastore, choose the appropriate option depending on the connectivity method that is configured, as shown in Figure 10.
All capability profiles that were previously created on the system are displayed in the datastore creation wizard. This allows you to select which capability profiles to include in this datastore. Selecting multiple capability profiles creates a vVol datastore that spans across multiple storage pools, which is a feature that is unique to Dell Unity vVol datastores. Doing this enables the datastore to be compatible with multiple VMware storage policies so VMs can be easily migrated by updating the storage policy. If a datastore only contains a single capability profile, it can still be migrated to using VMware Storage vMotion. In addition to selecting the capability profiles for this datastore, you can also configure how much storage to thinly allocate from each capability profile, as shown in Figure 11.
Regardless of which protocol is used for vVol datastore access, the ESXi hosts should be registered on the Dell Unity system so they can be granted access to the datastore. The registration process can be automated by importing the VMware environment (see the section VMware-aware Unisphere). ESXi hosts that attempt to mount datastores that they do not have access to appear as inaccessible. Host access can be added during creation, as shown in Figure 12, or configured on an existing vVol datastore.