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E-Series storage systems

Configure storage on the host in E-Series for VMware

Contributors netapp-driley netapp-jolieg NetAppZacharyWambold
PDFs

You can use the storage assigned to an ESXi host as either a Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastore or a raw device mapping (RDM). RDMs are not supported on the NVMe over fabric protocols (NVMe over FC, NVMe over RoCE, NVMe over TCP).

All current versions of ESXi support VMFS versions 5 and 6.

Note Use of VMFS extents on VMware is not recommended. Rather than adding another volume as an extent to an existing VMFS datastore to increase capacity, it is recommended to perform a DVE operation (How to expand Volumes - NetApp Knowledge Base) on the existing backing volume and grow the VMFS datastore.
Note It is recommended to use virtual RDMs or virtual disks instead of physical RDMs on Linux Virtual Machines.
Steps

  1. Make sure the volumes mapped to the ESXi host have been discovered properly.

  2. For instructions on creating VMFS datastores, see Create a vSphere VMFS Datastore.

  3. For instructions on creating RDMs, see Raw Device Mapping in vSphere.