Overview of the virtual appliance for VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA


Overview of the virtual appliance for VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA
The virtual appliance for Virtual Storage Console (VSC), VASA Provider, and Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) is a product suite that includes the capabilities of VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA. You can deploy this product suite as a virtual appliance, which reduces your effort of installing and registering each product separately with the vCenter Server.
The product suite includes SRA and VASA Provider as plug-ins for vCenter Server, which provide end-to-end lifecycle management for VMware virtual server environments running on NetApp storage and the VMware vSphere Web Client. The virtual appliance for VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA integrates smoothly with the VMware vSphere Web Client and enables you to use single sign-on (SSO) services. In an environment with multiple vCenter Server instances, each vCenter Server instance that you want to manage must have its own registered instance of VSC. The VSC dashboard page enables you to quickly check the overall status of your datastores and virtual machines.
Note: The NetApp blue "N" icon in the screens and portlets enables you to easily distinguish the NetApp features from the VMware features.
By running the virtual appliance for VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA, you can perform the following tasks:
For VASA Provider, you can add storage only as clusters.
You can add, remove, and assign credentials, and set up permissions for storage controllers within your VMware environment. In addition, you can manage the ESXi servers that are connected to NetApp storage. You can set values for host timeouts, NAS, and multipathing. You can also view storage details and collect diagnostic information.
You can monitor the performance of the datastores and virtual machines in your vCenter Server environment by using the Summary page and Reports page of the VSC GUI.
Any issues with storage systems and host systems are displayed on the dashboard. The predefined reports provide performance details about the datastores and virtual machines that are managed by VSC.
VASA Provider for ONTAP is registered with vCenter Server as soon as you enable the VASA Provider extension. You can create and use storage capability profiles and virtual datastores. You can also set alarms to warn you when volumes and aggregates are approaching the threshold limits. You can monitor the performance of virtual machines disks (VMDKs) and the virtual machines that are created on virtual datastores.
You can use SRA with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to configure protected sites and recovery sites in your environment for disaster recovery in the event of a failure.
You can configure and use VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA in the following combinations:
The configuration that you select depends on which tasks you want to perform by using VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA.
To enable administrators to control access to the vCenter Server objects and to secure the system, VSC supports role-based access control (RBAC) at two levels:
vSphere objects, such as virtual machines and datastores
These objects are managed by using vCenter Server RBAC.
The storage systems are managed by using ONTAP RBAC.
If access control is not an issue, you can log in as an administrator, and access all of the features that VSC provides.
Tip: VSC has a View privilege that is available after the virtual appliance for VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA is installed. You can add the View privilege to the vCenter Server roles. The View privilege is required if you want to view VSC in the VMware vSphere Web Client.
Next Topics:  
Features of the virtual appliance for VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA
Architecture of the virtual appliance for VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA