VFM® 6.0.2 Software—Description

VFM is a file virtualization solution for managing distributed storage environments. VFM enables storage administrators to create a single view of a heterogeneous enterprise file system that might consist of NetApp® storage systems, Windows® servers, and UNIX® servers. Using VFM, you can carry out management operations on large amounts of data without disrupting client access. VFM is installed on a Windows server and requires no agents to be installed on Windows or UNIX clients.

VFM provides the following benefits:

• Eliminates any need for client reconfiguration if data is moved to a new location
• Reduces downtime in case of a disaster
• Provides file-level heterogeneous replication and migration for NetApp storage system, Windows, and UNIX data
• Operates in heterogeneous, multivendor, multiarchitecture environments
• Lowers the cost of storage management and decreases the total cost of ownership

VFM 6.0.2 is a patch release that resolves the following issues found in the VFM 6.0.1 release:

• If the namespace was unavailable when a policy attempted to perform a namespace update during the final phase of a migration, the policy results reported that no links were updated. This has been corrected.
• If data was copied during the initial or incremental phases, VFM would perform a final copy during the final phase of data migration even if this option was not selected. This has been corrected.
• When the renaming of a .tmp file fails during replication, VFM now rolls back the file, preventing unintended accumulation of temporary files.
• VFM now consistently copies Brocade File Lifecycle Manager (FLM) metadata when copying FLM minifiles from the source directory.
• The VFM user interface now prevents you from selecting the mutually exclusive options “Preserve last access time on source” and “use snapshot data.” If both were selected, it would cause a policy to fail.
• Client Data Recovery failover did not initiate the associated namespace availability policy when it should have, resulting in the slave root becoming out of sync with the master root until the namespace availability policy either ran on schedule or was started manually. This issue has been resolved.
• If administrators were removed from the ACL on the source, and a synchronization of changed files was then performed with safe copy enabled, the replication failed and left behind temporary files. This issue has been resolved.
• The VFM user interface no longer shuts down unexpectedly when you change various replication policy options from the Tools > Options menu.

VFM 6.0 is a major release that adds the following new features:

• Phased migration—This feature enables you to stage the data migration operation. You can run automatically repeated data copy operations before running the final copy and cutover, and you control when the migration operation moves from one phase to another. This feature is available for the migration, archival migration, and storage load-balancing policies.

• Quick addition of multiple targets to a link—This feature enables you to clone an existing link target to quickly multiply the number of targets linked: for example, cloning a WAFS edge device can quickly increase the number of such devices linked to a WAFS core.

• Agent management—This feature enhances the management of replication and monitoring agents and the VFM server, including deployment credentials.

• Replication agent groups—This feature enables you to add multiple replication agents to an agent group and assign the group to a policy to distribute the data migration workload. This improves flexibility and throughput in many-to-one replication scenarios.

• DFS attributes supported for namespace backup and restore processes—This feature enables you to use the new DFS attributes introduced in Windows Server 2003 release 2.

Before installing VFM, ensure that the system in which the VFM components are installed meets the following requirements:

• At least 2 GB of RAM
• At least 2 GHz or faster processor
• 500 MB of free disk space
• 32-bit operating system (64-bit not supported)
• Microsoft® Windows® 2000 SP 4 or Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP 1 or later, to manage roots on separate servers
• Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 SP 1, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 RS Standard or Enterprise Edition, or Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP 1 or later, to manage multiple roots on a single Windows Server 2003
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) SP 3 or later, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Standard or Enterprise Edition SP 3 or later, or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, to install the VFM database and monitoring agents
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
• Internet Explorer™ 5.5 or later
• Windows Script Host 5.6 or later
• Local fixed NTFS disks, to install the VFM components
• Minimum video display of 1,024 by 768 pixels with 256 colors (more than 256 colors recommended for best display)
• Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) strongly recommended, to connect to remote machines (other products providing remote desktop access, such as VNC (Virtual Network Computing), have exhibited screen rendering problems with VFM)

To view VFM documentation, click here. After installing VFM, see the Readme file, readme.chm, in the installation directory for additional technical information.