EMC of late have been very good at increasing the level of integration between their storage and the VMWare platform. First it was DRS integrating with EMC QOS Manager, then the ability to view what VM’s reside on SAN storage from within Clariions Navisphere Manager, then replication manager was pulled inline to facilitate machine consistent snaps/replication with vmware using their VMFS proxy.
All very cool stuff, but now EMC are pulling the ability to manage storage from within EMC’s Celerra platform amd into VMWare’s VI Client. As of release 5.6.48 of DART (Dart is the firmware/OS for Celerra), you will be able to manage the creation and management of NFS exports from within VMWare and perform the following actions :
Create an NFS file system and mount to ESX systems to be used as a VMware data store. File systems created with the plug-in will be automatically deployed with EMC and VMware best practices, including Celerra Virtual Provisioning.
Data store (NFS file system) extension extends the Celerra file system that is exported to the ESX cluster.
Compress the VMware VMDK files associated with a virtual machine, a folder (of multiple virtual machines), an ESX server, or a whole data store. Decompress a previously compressed VMDK or set of VMDK files.
Full Clone—Make full copies of virtual machine VMDK files using new Celerra-based functionality
Fast Clone—Make thin copies of virtual machine VMDK files instantly using new Celerra NFS file-based snap functionality
Below is a very good video demonstation provided by the one and only virtualgeek Mr Chad Sakac, demonstrating the feature
