Datacenter
As of version 2.8 a new functionality was introduced, called Datacenter. This will allow a Syneto Storage to integrate with VMware. In order to active this feature a specific license is required: Small Business Datacenter or Enterprise Datacenter. Each license works for a limited number of hypervisors that can connect to the Syneto Storage. A hypervisor is part of a vHost (vCenter os ESX). 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, click the “Add vCenter / ESX” button and fill the host name, user name and password then press “Add”. If the form inputs were all filled correctly, the added vHost will be listed on the left side navigation tree.
Folding the tree, 2 main sections will be visible for each hypervisor, the Virtual Machines and Datastores.
Folding the tree further more, under Virtual Machines a list of virtual machines and under Datastores a list of datastores will be listed.
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 on which hosts is mounted.
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.
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 a NFS mounted folder if it’s quota is changed.
When creating local backups and the folders or virtual disks are connected to a VMware datastore there is an option to configure how to backup the virtual machines on that datastore: with or without memory and suspend disk writes.
When a backup starts information about the consolidation and backup progress will be shown. A snapshot will be taken for each virtual machine. After taking the snapshots a local backup will be made and finally the created snapshots will be deleted, finalizing the consolidation and backup process.
For both manual and automatic backups the history of the consolidation and backup progress can be viewed by clicking on the history button for the desired backup.
