Network Appliance technology enables companies to extend their virtual infrastructures to include advanced virtualized storage alongside their virtual servers. NetApp provides industry-leading solutions in the areas of data protection; ease of provisioning; thin storage provisioning; file-based backups; instantaneous virtual machine (VM) backup and restores; instantaneous VM cloning for testing, application development, and training purposes; and simple and flexible disaster recovery options.

This technical report reviews the best practices for implementing VMware Virtual Infrastructures on Network Appliance fabric-attached storage (FAS) systems. NetApp has been providing advanced storage features to VMware ESX solutions since the product began shipping in 2001. During that time, NetApp has developed operational guidelines for the FAS systems and ESX Server. These techniques have been documented and are referred to as best practices. This technical report describes them.