When deploying Dell UnityVSA OVA, the recommended disk format is Thick Provision Eager Zeroed, which allocates and zeroes out all the space for the virtual disks at the time of creation. This ensures better performance and avoids potential issues with thin provisioning on the underlying storage. Thin Provision and Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed are not recommended, as they may cause performance degradation and unexpected out-of-space errors.
The correct sequence of steps to provision storage for SMB NAS clients is:
Group hard drives into storage pools. This allows you to create a pool of storage resources that can be allocated to different types of storage objects, such as NAS servers, file systems, and LUNs.You can create different pools based on the performance and capacity requirements of your applications1
Create a NAS server for an existing pool. A NAS server is a logical entity that provides file-level access to clients using SMB, NFS, or FTP/SFTP protocols. You need to create a NAS server before you can create file systems and shares.You can specify the pool, network settings, domain membership, and other properties for the NAS server2
Create file systems and file system shares based on the supported NAS protocol. A file system is a logical container that stores files and folders on a NAS server. A file system share is a logical representation of a file system that can be accessed by clients using a specific protocol. For SMB NAS clients, you need to create SMB file system shares that support the SMB protocol.You can configure the share name, permissions, access policies, and other settings for the SMB share3
Map the shared file system to the client. This allows the client to access the files and folders on the SMB share using a drive letter or a UNC path.You can use the Windows Explorer or the net use command to map the shared file system to the client4
