Administrator Guide

22 Dell FS8600 with VMware vSphere  Deployment and Configuration Best practices
To ensure consistency, use the following procedure to clone datastores:
1. Ensure the virtual machines residing in the base datastore are shut down.
2. In the FS8600, take a snapshot of the datastore NAS volume.
3. Take a consistent snapshot of the NAS volume where the datastore resides
4. Make a NAS volume clone from the snapshot.
5. Export the root folder of the clone volume and grant permissions to the ESX hosts IP addresses to access it.
6. Using the vSphere Web Plugin, create a new datastore using the export.
7. Browse the new datastore and import the Virtual Machines to the vCenter inventory.
8. Restore the VMs to the latest snapshot prefixed 
7.7 Migrating Datastores/Virtual Machines to the FS8600
When the FS8600 is deployed in an existing environment and virtual machines or datastores need to be migrated from
another backend to the FS8600, Dell recommends performing the migration process using vSphere migration. Virtual
machine files written to the FS8600 by the ESX hosts will be better distributed among the file system resources and
result in better overall performance. Dell does not recommend bypassing the hosts and using external clients or tools to
migrate virtual machine files.