VMware datacenter allows a Syneto Storage to integrate with VMware ESX/vCenter. In order to activate this feature a specific license is required: Small Business Datacenter or Enterprise Datacenter. Each license allows a certain number of hypervisors to connect to the Syneto Storage. A hypervisor is part of a vHost. A vHost of type vCenter may contain one or more hypervisors. An ESX on the other hand is directly associated with only a single hypervisor.
Adding a vHost is pretty straight forward. Go to Virtualization > VMware datacenter, click the Add vCenter / ESX button, fill in the host name, credentials and press Add. If the form inputs were all filled correctly, the added vHost will be listed on the left side navigation tree.
Two main sections will be visible for each hypervisor, the Virtual Machines and Datastores. Expanding the tree further, under Virtual Machines you can see a list of virtual machines and datastores.
Selecting a datastore from the tree will show more details about it, like size, free space, file system type, connected folder or virtual disk, a list of virtual machines and which hosts it is mounted on.
Selecting a virtual machine from the tree will show more details about it, like on which datastore it resides, disk usage, number of CPUs and how much memory it has.
If you open the Data management > Folders / Virtual disks page and view at the left side tree, any folders or virtual disks connected to a VMWare host will be marked with a special icon. Selecting such a folder or virtual disk for more details will show to which datastore it is connected and on what host.
Datastore sizes expand automatically based on the size of the underlying folder/vdisk. In case of running out of disk space on a virtual disk, it can be expanded, the datastore will automatically expand too. The same thing will happen to an NFS mounted folder if its quota is changed.
Taking snapshots
When creating local snapshots and the folders or virtual disks are connected to a VMware datastore, there is an option to configure how to take snapshots of the virtual machines on that datastore: with or without memory and suspend disk writes. You can also choose to skip taking a VMware snapshot for a certain virtual machine by checking the Skip VMware Snapshots option.
When a local snapshot starts, information about the consolidation and snapshot progress will be shown. A snapshot will be taken for each virtual machine. After taking the snapshots, a local snapshot will be made and finally, the created snapshots will be deleted, finalizing the consolidation and snapshot process.
For both manual and automatic snapshots, the history of the consolidation and snapshot progress can be viewed by clicking on the history button for the desired snapshot.
