VFM® 6.0 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, multi-vendor, multi-architecture environments
• Lowers the cost of storage management and decreases the total cost of ownership

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 archival migration, 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 back up and restore—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:

• Microsoft® Windows® 2000 SP 2 or later or Windows XP Professional, to manage roots on Windows NT® 4 or Windows 2000 servers
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Windows Server™ 2003, to manage multiple roots on a single Windows Server 2003
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) Service Pack 3 or later, SQL Server 2000 Standard or Enterprise Edition Service Pack 3 or later, or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Standard or 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
• At least 2 GB of RAM
• At least 2 GHz or faster processor
• 500 MB of free disk space
• Local fixed NTFS disks, to install the VFM components
• 32-bit operating system (64-bit not supported)
• 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, have exhibited screen rendering problems with VFM)
  

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