Dell VxRail™ Appliance 4.7x Administration Guide

NFS and VMFS over iSCSI datastores

Your VxRail can be used with external storage with NFS datastores or VMFS over iSCSI datastores.

You may want to consider using external storage for workloads with high storage capacity requirements relative to the amount of required compute resources (CPU cores and RAM). External datastores allow you to scale VxRail compute resources separately from storage capacity. This can improved overall hardware usage levels. As a result it may be more cost-effective to use an external storage array such as Unity, VNX, Cloudarray, Isilon, or Windows/Linux storage services to provide additional storage for your VxRail cluster.

Note that external storage arrays must be managed separately. You cannot use the automated workflows in VxRail Manager for vSphere storage configuration and management with external datastores. Instead, you must use the vSphere Client to configure NFS and iSCSI on the ESXi hosts in the VxRail cluster, and to create NFS datastores and VMFS datastores over iSCSI on external arrays in the vCenter Server Appliance instance in the VxRail cluster. You must also use provisioning virtual machines on these external datastores in vCenter using the vSphere Client.

Refer to VMware vSphere documentation for details about using NFS and iSCSI storage with ESXi:

• Understanding Network File System Datastores
• About the Software iSCSI Adapter